I missed the last status report, so this will just be a big one with everything, sorry Charles. In the past two weeks, we received and assembled the spookpower and spooktroller boards, and did basic testing of them. So far, they are without any problems. Once we exercised all of the basic peripherals, like the 3 phase pwm generation, adc triggering, and UART, I ported over the janktroller code. It didn’t work for a while because the faster control loop…
This week was focused on getting the new motor controller boards finalized and ordered. I put together the BOMs and Deepak sent in the order, and I exported the boards and uploaded them to PCBway. After that, I have been helping make sure that we have all the parts and procedures we’ll need to conduct our testing once the boards arrive.
This past week, I finished the schematics for spookpower and spooktroller (the two components of the UPMC, Electric Boogaloo), and also finished a first pass of layout and routing. It was a lot of work. The silks are not final. These should be ready to order in the next few days. The power board has had a good amount of thought put into making it robust, with trace ampacity calculations and snubber circuits and all that put in, however the…
This week, I got the estimator working to actually commutate the motor and started the process of tuning it. I also have 90% finished the schematics for electric boogaloo and the routing will start after my next midterm. The way that we are sensing the rotor position uses a flux linkage observer, which essentially measures the ratio of the magnetic flux applied to each phase (integral of voltage over time) and compares it to the actual flux moving through the…
This week, I worked on making use of our now useful ADC sampling. This gives us current information for each phase, sampled when the low side gate is on in phase with the PWM frequency, which avoids aliasing effects and makes sure that the shunt amplifier output is valid. So far, I have enabled the current feedback for the D Q control loop, so when you command a certain current vector, the controller actually creates that in the motor. I…
This week, I wrote an implementation of a flux observer for the janktroller. It uses an integrator to determine the flux that has been put into each phase, and reads the current currently in the phase to sense the ratio between them, which is the flux linkage. This varies as that magnets move around the stator, and with the three flux linkages and some trig you can calculate the electrical position of the rotor. A large benefit of a flux…
I have brought ROTATÉ into this world. ROTATÉ is a python utility that allows us to visualize and process the data from the JANKTROLLER in real time, which will be indispensable for tuning control loops and validating sensors. It isn’t pretty, but it gets the job done, and the underlying data passing system allows us to easily add messages and make logs. It is also fairly fault tolerant, as a delimiter or message tag gets dropped every now and then. In addition…
This week, I adapted the PWM driver to take duty cycles for each phase and then ported the simulation stuff to the janktroller and it spun the motor. It was very good because it proved that all of the power controls and stuff works and gave us a baseline to start looking at ADC readings, but also very bad because we haven’t brought up the ADCs yet so it was entirely “dumb” control. Being able to make the motor move…
Right now, the biggest risks to our project staying on schedule is the Janktroller not working or being broken, which would hamstring firmware development. To minimize the consequences of any accidents, we have a stock of extras of the parts most likely to be damaged in our testing (MOSFETS and gate drivers), as well as extra boards. We haven’t had to make any design changes yet. We are proceeding to move into basic firmware development with timer and ADC bringup,…
The primary thing that I accomplished this week was finishing the assembly of the Janktroller++, which will allow us to begin some of our hardware testing. This involved soldering the rest of the components to the board, cleaning up solder bridges, and then wiring it up and running some initial diagnostic tests. Having a working Janktroller will give us a good platform for developing our firmware with lower stakes before moving onto a bigger controller. I have also started working…