Hi,
First and foremost I’m eager to learn from this experience and not repeat it so do not hesitate to dispense your advice.
I started making a simulator for flying a parachute using two brake toggles for an embedded class. I was mostly debugging the hardware which consisted of 1x arduino Uno, 2x simple FOC shield v2 and 2x GM4108H gimbal motor. All this powered by 1x 11.1v lipo battery. I concluded that one GM4108H motor was dead on arrival. And for the remaining motor, I had the only dependable motor driver, a simple FOC shield v2 blow up on me since a few strands of the 14ga hot and ground were touching while entering their own respective terminals. +1 to wiring harnesses! When using a backup arduino board the same issue happened and then fried a arduino. I was not able to complete my class project due to repeated shorts while debugging hardware late at night.
Learning
- wiring harneses are the way to go. hot loose stranded wire tends to short everything. Which harnesses do you recommend for 14ga wire going into a simple FOC shield?
- Arduino uno gets short on memory fast. I want to use an ESP32 next time, what is a recommended motor driver setup for ESP32? The simple FOC shields won’t fit it obviously.
- In order to control two motors independently, I alternated the 0 resistor bridges on a simple FOC shield for PWM A,B,C and A/I, B/I and Index for encoders. I could never get FOC init with that motor driver. I think i realized later that the interrupts are only pins 2 and 3, and since that became 11 and 12, maybe the encoder for that motor driver couldn’t be seen enough for FOC initialization.
If anybody has any advice or can point me in the right direction for the question of what motor drivers to use for GM4108H in connection with ESP32 that would be great. For the next project that is the hardware I want to use.