Infineon bldc shields impressions

happytm · January 5, 2021, 12:25am

Thanks.

Juxo · January 5, 2021, 12:12pm

The most interesting I can see here is the usage of an blue-pill as a stack board.
Because Arduino is obviously not sufficient for high-level tasks it seems to be a good idea to make the next SimpleFOC shield similar. Probably with support of blue-pill and black-pill (what would be my favourit )

Juxo · January 5, 2021, 12:15pm

Are you sure that the chinese really use Antun’s library for their project?

Juxo · January 5, 2021, 12:20pm

This board would be the one I also would prefere.
In my current project I have to switch between position-, velocity- and voltage mode frequently. That’s why I love the SimpleFOC.
I use the other Infineon board until I get a new one that supports SimpleFOC. Currently I just collect temperature and efficiency values.

Antun_Skuric · January 5, 2021, 12:48pm

I am not sure they use simplefoc library, but this guy has used simplefoc is some other videos I think. Nevertheless, I am sure this ic would be supported by simplefoc.

Also @Juxo in this video I think they are using Arduino Nano. Bluepill would be better for sure.

feng · January 10, 2021, 6:42am

@Antun_Skuric
Using btn7960 or btn8982 three half bridge chip to make a simple driver board.Using single chip processor esp32 to brush simplefoc can open-loop control.There’s no test, but it looks good! You can try it!

Using btn7960 or btn8982 three half bridge chip to make a simple driver board.

Before I drew 2 Allegro, using 5010 motor, a little hot, current sound is very big, no test! However, the current within 10 a motor should be good!

Antun_Skuric · January 10, 2021, 8:45am

Wow, you guys are iterating so fast!

That’s cool, i definitely think these chips have a potential as reasonably simple solution for higher power chips.

Are btb7960 or btn8982 available on JLCpcb?

feng · January 10, 2021, 12:30pm

Hey,@ Antun_Skuric
I used easyeda online tools to draw the board. Ifx007t (300W) is not cheap. Jlcpcb should have btn7960, 7971b, 8962 and other chips (250W). It should be able to directly SMD. However, I didn’t verify the board above, so I verified the small board of btn7960 with only three chips. See the video link, Generally, we weld manually! If you want to verify the source file, I can send it to you!

zjor · February 7, 2021, 11:40am

Hello, I’m a newbie here.
Just wanted to confirm if there is support for the Infineon
BLDC-SHIELD_IFX007T shield?

Each bridge requires 2 pins INU/INHU, INV/INHV, INW/INHW, while SimpleFOCLibrary allows specifying only 3 phase pins. So it’s not possible to use this shield, is my thinking correct?

Thanks in advance!

Owen_Williams · February 7, 2021, 2:35pm

Welcome @zjor.
You’ll have to manually enable each phase yourself in setup(). I’ve used btn8982 which are really similar to ifx007. Things like motor.disable() won’t work but that isn’t a big issue.

Being able to disable each phase is interesting as it means that you can more easily do sensorless commutation. i.e. one phase is always disabled and you monitor bemf current to see when that phase changes polarity. We don’t have support for this yet but the trapezoidal_120 modulation is a step in that direction.

zjor · February 7, 2021, 2:42pm

Thanks for the quick reply!
Does it mean I have to set all INH* pins to HIGH only once in the setup?
Also, is it possible to use BLDCDriver6PWM instead, or is it a totally different thing (I tried it and the rotation was quite jerky)?
I was trying a combination of IFX007T + Atmega2560 + some RC airplane motor + AMT103

Antun_Skuric · February 7, 2021, 5:01pm

Hey @zjor,
BldcDriver6pwm is not intended for that. Do not use that one.
The infineon shields need only 3 pwm signals and 3 enable signals.
You have two choices really:
1)provide 1 enable to BLDCDriver3pwm and 2 of them enable in the setup function:

void setup(){
...
 digitalWrite(INH2, HIGH);
 digitalWrite(INH3, HIGH);
...
}

use the dev version of the library which has implemented already this feature. You can provide them at the same time to the BLDCMotor3PWM:

BLDCMotor3PWM (IN1,IN2, IN3, INH1,INH2, INH3)

The dev version is not yet documented well and it has some changements in the api (just a bit in your case) so its up to you.

But this will be a standard feature from the next release. (Next week)

zjor · February 7, 2021, 6:29pm

thanks @Antun_Skuric, that was helpful!

Antun_Skuric · February 7, 2021, 9:04pm

Cool,
Let us know how it goes. I’m really interested too see some results and i really have great hopes for it.
I’d like the btn8982 or ifx007t to be the bases for the higher power version of the foc shield

And infineon guys have done a great job!

But i would like it to be a bit smaller, cheaper and bit more modular.

Valentine · May 3, 2021, 11:26pm

To revive the discussion, does the current stable release support the ifx007T shield?

Antun_Skuric · May 4, 2021, 4:18am

Hey Valentine,
Yes, it supptrs everything except that doesn’t not involve current sensing (back emf and foc using high-side currents on pins IS).

You can set three enable pins and three odma pins directly in the constructor of the BLDCDriver class and use it as any other 3pwm bldg driver.

Valentine · May 4, 2021, 5:20pm

@Antun_Skuric,

Thank you, I was wondering about that, they hobbled the original nice design by back-porting it to fit the atmega instead of making future-proof.

Question: Regardless, if I connect an MCU capable of taking input from three external inline ACS772 sensors I can ignore the board weird current sense and should be able to run simplefoc with current sense?

Cheers,
Valentine

Antun_Skuric · May 4, 2021, 5:46pm

Hey @Valentine,

Yep, its a pity they did not continue their design further, there is a real potential in developing the boards like that one!

Yep, that will work.
I’m in the process of developing a bit stronger verison of the SimpleFOCShield which uses a similar topology: GitHub - simplefoc/Arduino-SimpleFOC-PowerShield: A powerful Arduino shield for running BLDC motors using the FOC algorithm

At the end I’ve removed completely the high-side current sense and added inline sensors to the board. It works well with the library. There is an example code in the dev branch at the moment:

github.com

simplefoc/Arduino-FOC/blob/dev/examples/hardware_specific_examples/SimpleFOC-PowerShield/version_v02/single_full_control_example/single_full_control_example.ino


#include <SimpleFOC.h>

// BLDC motor & driver instance
BLDCMotor motor = BLDCMotor(7);
BLDCDriver3PWM driver = BLDCDriver3PWM(9, 5, 6, 8, 4, 7);

// encoder instance
Encoder encoder = Encoder(10, 11, 500);
// channel A and B callbacks
void doA(){encoder.handleA();}
void doB(){encoder.handleB();}

// inline current sensor instance
InlineCurrentSense current_sense = InlineCurrentSense(0.001f, 50.0f, A0, A1);

// commander communication instance
Commander command = Commander(Serial);
// void doMotor(char* cmd){ command.motor(&motor, cmd); }
void doTarget(char* cmd){ command.scalar(&motor.target, cmd); }

This file has been truncated. show original

Valentine · May 4, 2021, 9:10pm

@Antun_Skuric,

Thank you, that was very helpful.

Question 1: I see you added only 2 current sense resistors. Perhaps an obvious answer, but if I add three, does SimpleFOC take 3 or I have to feed only the first and third?

Edit: I see it does, found some time to browse the code. Please ignore my question, thanks.

Question 2: The power shield looks very nice. What is it’s availability / release date?

Thanks,
Valentine

Antun_Skuric · May 7, 2021, 5:52am

Hey @Valentine,

I’ve already thested all the versions in the main branch and they seem to work pretty well. I was able to push the shield to 25Amps on 8Volts (the only powerful lipo battery I have is 2S).
So you can actually already order the version v0.2 from the JLCPCB for example.

For them to be available in the shop I want it to be stackable, have the configurable pinout, have an additional LDO, and do some more testing. The boards is already almost there and the version v1.0 will I hope be available in June.
I’ve ordered the latest versions few days ago on JLCPCB and they should arrive next week. The new board is in the dev branch for the moment.