Bugger – checking ground plane integrity I realize that it is broken. The green areas have component grounding, but the 3D showed that it was connected – the real PCB is however not connected. I should have forced a track here to ensure that this was connected, but I will solder a wire on the…
I did the PCB for this motor controller before I moved on to do a lot of other Hat’s and added it to a batch as I ordered PCB’s later. I obviously did not spend much time looking over the design. Looking at the capacitors I realized that ground plane was broken between capacitors and…
This is the 2nd unit where I have not added header yet. I tried to manually solder on the capacitors, but failed so I tried the IR heater and realized that the unit was to tall to go in with the header so I soldered the unit that did not have a header yet. Looking…
This shows the actual board with an extra long (11mm) PCB extender. This works fine, so I think I will just stick to this solution. I still have to test with heat-sink’s added thought.
It’s fun to assemble a Hat as complicated as a 4-channel Motor Driver the first time, but you need to be prepared for a few surprices. I spaced out 4 connectors to be able to test each channel better and the intention was to add JST Micro connectors. But, as I only used 1.27 headers…
I am quite pleased with the 1000uF and supercap design, but they are to tall for the 8mm spacer between boards. I will have problems stacking other board on top as they risk shorting the boards. I can just about get one of the smaller super-caps, but no chance for the 1000uF capacitors. The easiest…
I have always added a minimum on components on my design and on the 60V/50A Motor Driver I have 4 PSU of which 3 is SPC3819. So assembling this I only mounted a minimum to get the MCU ticking and got a surprise – it would not tick. Soldering off MCU, putting it in tester…
I want to attempt a few changes on this 3-phase controller. Remove the 3rd current sensor marked in red at top. Remove the output holes at right and take the output directly from between the MOSFET’s. Add at least 1 temperature sensor. I can use more space between MOSFET channels and maybe squeeze in the…
I showed the MOSFET driven resistor array earlier and while searching for digital potentiometers I found 2 that are SPI based on 10K. One is the MCP41010 with 255 steps, but the one I really liked is the new AD5231 with 1024 steps. They exist in 10K, 50K and 100K versions and provide a far…
I started to mechanically assemble the 4 channel 3KW controller. One note is that 2mm wire is easy to work with, while 3mm wire is very hard to get right. In fact, to assemble this it might be better to design with 2x 2mm wires than using a 3mm. I have not started with components…