Smart BLDC Commutator Back in Stock

Good news! The Smart BLDC Commutator is back in stock.

Also, I am back from vacation and will resume shipping orders. All those who ordered from the Makeatronics Store in the past week will be receiving shipping notices tomorrow.

Makeatronics Store Stock and Shipping

Wow. The Smart BLDC Commutator board has been a hot item. My stock of PCB's has been depleted much faster than I anticipated. I placed an order for a while back, they are on their way with expected arrival in the first week of October.

Also, I am going to be out of town and not shipping orders from Sept 18 - Oct 1. Any orders placed by end of day Tuesday (that are in stock, of course) will be shipped out before I leave. You can still place orders after that but they won't ship until Oct 2.

Thanks everybody for your support!

Wireless HVAC Sensors - V3 now available

At last we have it. V3 of my wireless HVAC sensor board has been tested and the hardware is done. There were some tweaks to the board over V2, one to fix a mis-routed trace and several geometric improvements to get it to fit inside an electrical box. And now all is well.

3D Printer Progress

Despite the lack of posts on the subject, progress is slowly being made on my 3D printer. A few months ago I got the structure pretty well flushed out in CAD. As sized in the model, this allows for something more than a 12 inch diameter build area. The height of the build is limited by how long I want to make the drive axes, in this version I targeted 12 inches tall.

Smart BLDC Commutator For Sale

The wait is over, the Smart BLDC Commutator is now available for purchase in the Makeatronics Store.

Unlike my other boards so far, I am not (yet) offering this one as a complete assembly. It's all surface mount and takes too long for me to assemble them myself. I am working on getting a stencil made so I can reflow them in my hacked toaster oven.

Thanks for checking in!

Smart BLDC Commutator - Hardware

Of all my circuits to date, the Smart BLDC Commutator is probably the one I'm most proud of. To those coming here for the first time, this board is for driving brushless DC (BLDC) motors. I spent a lot of time researching and prototyping to come up with this board. If you are trying to figure out how to drive a BLDC motor I think you will find the information below very helpful.

From a high level, I wanted an interface to a BLDC motor that behaved much like a H-bridge does for a brushed DC motor. The result is a board that handles the heavy work of commutating of a BLDC motor using hall effect feedback. After hooking up power, motor wires and hall sensors, the minimal inputs required to the board are direction (high/low) and PWM. Everything else is taken care of to properly spin the motor. Pretty nifty.

Scrap Yard

Check out the new Scrap Yard!

The process of making good designs often includes a few mistakes. Sometimes I'm lucky and get things working on the first try, but more often it takes two or three revisions to get it there. And since the PCB manufacturer I use has a minimum order quantity I end up with a fair amount of scrap.

Rather than throwing them away, I've decided to sell the extra boards at discount price. It's up to you to get them working. I will provide details of fixes I have made to get them functional, just click on the images to be taken to the details.

Obviously, I have a limited quantity of these boards. Once they are gone they will be deleted from the scrap yard never to return. Check back as often as you like, this page will be changing as I embark on new (and revisit old) projects. 

Smart BLDC Commutator Coming Soon

I recently received a small batch of Smart BLDC Commutator boards to verify V3 routing. I'm pleased to announce that it tested flawlessly. I made a few changes to the silkscreen, including some equations to the back side to help in using motors with voltages outside the current design limits, and placed an order for a larger batch.

I expect boards to be in by the end of August 2014. After a quick overview to make sure all is well I will put them up for sale in the Makeatronics Store.

Once I get some time I will write up a detailed post on the hardware changes and the firmware running on it. Until then, here's the schematic if anybody wants to benefit from my experimenting.

Design files are hosted on GitHub and licensed under CERN OHL v.1.2.

Firmware is hosted on GitHub and licensed under the BSD 3 clause license.

Wireless HVAC Sensors - Part 2

Previously I introduced the idea of a battery operated wireless sensor board for sensing temperature and humidity. The intent is to get information to my Raspberry Pi (or Arduino, or any other microcontroller) so that it can intelligently control the HVAC system in my house. Today I give you an update on the project.

Makeatronics Store Now Online

Up to this point all products I've put up for sale have been so only through the blog post that described them. This quickly got confusing and cumbersome as I've slowly finished more projects and released them for sale. Now I've built a simple store to host everything. Blog posts where things used to be for sale have been updated to point to the store.

Up to now I have only offered a few bare PCB's for sale. I am now offering the PCB's with loose components and fully assembled products. As time goes on I hope to also have mechanical items available (think 3D printer parts) plus who knows what else.

If you like the projects you see on this blog the best way to support is to make a purchase in the store. Funds received through sales have a direct impact on the time and money I can spend on new and exciting projects.

Without further adieu, follow this link to the store:
makeatronics.blogspot.com/p/store.html

BLDC Hall Effect Sensors

So I've had two posts now where I talk about adding hall effect sensors to a BLDC motor. I figure it's time to explain a bit more how the process works.

This method only works with an outrunner style motor (that is, the rotor spins around the outside of the stator) with the magnets exposed on the underside of the rotor, such as this:

BLDC Motor Control

As part of my 3D printer project, one of the big electronics hurdles to overcome was a motor controller for a BLDC (BrushLess Direct Current) motor. Searching for a cheap, off the shelf controllers that would interface easily with a microcontroller turned up fruitless, so I took the opportunity to design my own circuit. It was a major project in itself, and while there's still a few hardware tweaks to make I'm quite happy with how it has turned out.

3D Printer Motor Control - Part 1

So I've been moving forward with my 3D printer plans slowly but surely. I've mainly been focusing on the drive axes up to this point, more specifically the details of controlling the motor. As outlined in my 3D printer post, I am planning on using closed loop position control with brushless DC (BLDC) motors, rather than the standard open loop control with stepper motors.