Hello!
We are developing a project to teach PID control by letting kids physically manipulate a lever arm that is being controlled by a tunable PID controller. This means having a motor attached to the arm for which we control the torque.
Brushed motors had too low torque and too high internal friction, especially when the large gearbox is attached. We found that people suggest using low kv brushless drone motors (like a 5010 360KV High Torque Brushless Motor) for super low friction and high torque. Friends who know more about motors suggested either ODrive for simplicity or SimpleFOC for cost. ODrive is far too expensive for us so we are now looking at SimpleFOC and we don’t need above 5 amps anyways.
Is SimpleFOC going to be capable of this? Will it enable us to specify a given torque we want at the output?
Sorry if I have not given enough detail. We are software and control people and trying to navigate our way through the hardware the best we can.
Thank you for your help!
1 Answer
1
Yep, it’ll work. 5010 will not have much torque to feel on an arm, but fine for observing the behavior of PID tuning.
There’s a shortage of good medium-current drivers available for individual purchase. MKS Dual FOC might be your best bet. There are several open source designs like SimpleFOC Mini v2, SimpleFOC DriveShield, MicroSpora, and my own Gooser, but you either have to assemble them yourself, or order at least 2 assembled from JLCPCB which is fairly expensive per unit compared to larger orders.
The regular SimpleFOC Shield or Mini could work, but a little underpowered and easy to burn.
There’s a complete kit on Amazon that looks like it could work, with a higher resistance motor, Mini, and AS5600 Amazon.com: 2804 Brushless Outrunner Hollow Shaft DC Motor Kit with AS5600 Magnetic Encoder & SimpleFOC Mini Driver Board for Gimbal Drones | Brushless DC Outrunner with Hollow Shaft, 300 g·cm Torque, SimpleFOC Mini Driver for Gimbal Drones : Toys & Games You’d also need an Arduino or Pico or whatever to run the code. The motor is about half the size of 5010, but still ok for demonstration. AS5600 is a little slow and low resolution, but probably fine. Just will be a little jittery feel in the hand, and won’t be able to get the PID tuned for super fast response unless you write custom I2C code to read it asynchronously so it doesn’t slow down the main loop.