I have been looking at off the shelf low cost brushless outrunners with minimal wiring and complexity and have been experimenting with the BLDCs from massage guns.
They put out good torque (~0.1Nm - 3000rpm), are controlled over PWM (seems to be a voltage control drive), and have an 6 pulse per rev output.
Cost on AliExpress is $4.50 USD (probably surplus), for brand new ones they go for about $15 USD.
Are you think of programming that chip? I can’t find and arduino compatibility, so it would seem a challenge. I guess you could pull the ic off and use a different driver but then not so cheap.
Theres something useful on the board already. I can see the drivers and hall sensors.
Just add some jump wire to arduino and try it. You may able to drive it with only 3 PWM and 3 hall pin.
Hi @AlexR-D,
It is awesome the price of 3.9€ ! What is the reference of Mos ? Could you read the part ref ?
The family MS51 was the top of the microcontroller at the time .
That is an option, but probably doesn’t make sense for me from a time perspective - without Arduino it would take a considerable time investment to program it from scratch and reverse engineer everything on the board.
I know, it’s unbelievable they can sell at these prices. Are you asking about the mosfets? They are marked “XT 1948” which doesn’t yield much on google.
If I make any progress on convincing a Chinese factory to make me custom firmware I will report back - using this board just for commutation would let you run simpleFOC with just a microcontroller. Hall feedback is enough for many applications.
HI,
the motor wiring looks like it is at “wye connection” (star connection), resistance between 2 lines is about 8.4 Ohm, so one phase is 4.2 ohms.
It’s for the BL4818, - there is also a BL5520 at Aliexpress and at Alibaba you can find offers for several different (bigger) sizes to.
Atm i have only the BL4818, which i want to mount to an planetary gear and use it as a “in wheel drive”.
Cheers, Those are really cheap. I will nab some. How are you going about driving them now? Are you using whats on the Circuit board there or have something custom…for our swarm robots this would be great for a slightly larger robot.
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