We got the boards and we flowed them this week! Most things seem to be alive, as we immediately tested our safety limiting operations such as overcurrent and overvoltage protection, both of which deemed safe and working. After some preliminary investigation with the old small motor with the UPMC, we have determined that sinusoidal FOC does not like to run on a motor that is not sinusoidal, which is our small motor. Therefore, we have moved onto PID and other motor control loop tuning with the big and beefy motors that we intend on using.

We have also been making a lot of progress with mechanical things, which involves a lot of chasing meches down to have them machine things for us. We have a pretty stable dyno setup and the fets and the ACDC converters all got here this week, which was helpful as we start to wire those together. In addition to drilling holes for the dyno motor sprockets, we’re also going to make spacers and other standoffs such that things don’t kill themselves as the motor ramps up to high speed.

We also decided that we will focus on having the dyno mechanically complete before we leave for Thanksgiving, for the initial demo on Monday that we get back. This is because attaching thingsto the final bike will take more time and parts, which we will do after the dyno is done.

 

Motor control firmware is hard