Low Budget Open Source Alternatives to SimpleFOC PowerShield?

hardware support
1

I want to get started with high performance motor control with SimpleFOC, and the Powershield seems like almost the perfect option. I would have purchased a DRV8302 driver off of Aliexpress, but I wanted to work on piecing together my own PCBs and getting a bit more soldering practice, so I thought building together the PowerShield. Are there any other similar designs that is in the same price range, can drive motors around the same power range, and can (optionally) drive high performance motors?

I’m a bit worried about the BTN8982 half bridges, but would I be able to get the entire driver up to a substantial amount of power without running into issues? Are there any other alternative to the BTN8982 that is a drop-in or can be substituted into the circuit without too extensive of a redesign?

2

Hi @itisyee , welcome to SimpleFOC!

Sorry about the late reply, been a little busy lately :slight_smile:

Please don’t duplicate the PowerShield design, it is not yet complete. the Version based on BTN8982 isn’t suitable for BLDC motor driving with SimpleFOC. We are working on a redesign, but it is not yet finished.

In the meantime, the DRV8302 based boards you can find on AliExpress may be a good option, or else you can check our forums, there have been a few high power designs by Valentine that he has shared details of, which would be more suitable to your needs.

3

Thank you for the response! I found QVADRANs, which is perfect for my use case! Thank you for the warm welcome too.

4

Do you have a link to QVADRAN?

5

Right here: QVADRANS

6

Cheers,
Valentine

7

Thank you very much for the link to QVADRANS. Looks very interisting to me.

One minor drawback could be, that you use some “unusual” components, as the gate-driver or the current-sensors. These components are unavailable e.g. from DigiKey.

I wasn’t aware of these double MosFETS! Cool! Do you think, it would be possible to solder them by hand?

8

probably not. this is designed to be smd by jlcpcb end to end.
cheers
valentine

9

Ok, thank you.
Beacuse all valuable µC pins are available on the headers it looks very good as a plattform for own experiments.
Is it ready to order from JLCPCB?

10

One additional comment: the g431 has no eeprom on-chip, but thta might be useful to save some calibration data.

11

You need to order it yourself.
Ask us if you need help if you get stuck.

Cheers,
Valentine

12

There are libraries to use the on-board flash as EEPROM, if you need low write cycles (e.g. calibration data). I have used this to store some simpleFOC data: https://github.com/VIPQualityPost/aioli-foc/blob/canbus/firmware/src/main.cpp#L64

13

Ok, I just tried that via EasyEDA to upload to JLCPDB. PCB & Assembly for 5 items is 134€ Looks ok, but I only need 3 I think: one to burn, one to test, one to use :wink: