Recommendations for driver board, gimbal motor and sensors

hardware support
1

I purchased a Nucleo-64 F466RE micro-controller board. Since SimpleFOC boards aren’t available I’d like recommendations of a driver board, a compatible gimbal motor and sensor that I could purchase from Amazon.

Thanks in advance,

Wink

2

Hi @winksaville , welcome to SimpleFOC!

Please let us know a little bit about how you intend to use the motor? Its hard to make a recommendation without knowing how it will be used…

In terms of “generic” recommendations, if you just want any gimbal motor, the ones from eMax or iPower are quite nice, and generally easily available:

And to go with your Nucleo, you could try one of these shields: X-NUCLEO-IHM07M1 - Three-phase brushless DC motor driver expansion board based on L6230 for STM32 Nucleo - STMicroelectronics
They’re not too expensive, fit directly onto the Nucleo64 boards, and this one uses the same driver chip as the SimpleFOC shield. Power-wise its a good match for the gimbal motors linked above.

3

@runger TYVM! My initial application is just to learn how to control/use BLDC motors, so the information was perfect!

Showing my ignorance, on iFlight there appear to be 3 choices

  1. GBM2804H-100T
  2. GM2804
  3. GM2804 w/Encoder

I’m guessing I should get #3 “GM2804 w/Encoder” but that’s because I assume it would be useful but maybe not required to have an Encoder. My guess #2 is the same as #3 without the encoder. But no guess when #1 would be desirable.

Help appreciated!

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  1. and 2. Look like very similarly spec’d motors. A gimbal motor designed to move a go pro - so light weight, slow RPM, quite smooth motion.
  2. includes an encoder the url indicates that it is a as5048a. This is a high quality SPI that many on this forum use and like.

If you want to control your motor closed loop, then this encoder is a great choice. Buying separately, you’d be paying about 15$ for the as5048a, another $1 for the magnet and then you still need to attach it (might need to design a shim and enclosure and 3d print it). So getting this already attached is handy. Some start with the very cheap as5600 ($3) but it is much slower/less accurate than as5048a resulting in it being hard to tune PIDs closed loop.

5

Owen, txs!

To reduce my ignorance, two questions:

  1. SPI is this → How to use SPI for dc motors?
  2. The “T” designation as in “-100T” is what?
6

Hi @winksaville ,

Sorry, I did not get into this question, or recommend any sensors. Yes, you will definately want a sensor to do FOC control of the motor. Open loop control is very inefficient in comparison.

Getting a motor with integrated sensor will make things easier, as you won’t have to make the connection between them yourself. But typically it comes at quite a surcharge compared to buying them separately.

No, in this case SPI is used as the communication interface with the sensor.

I think its the number of turns of the winding…

7

Providing T= number of turns is a bit confusing, because it’s hard to compare it with other stator heights.
A better term is kV= RPM per Volt, which is comparable between different stators.
High T-count and low kV stand for slower and strong motors.

8

Adafruit has some good smooth low cogging motors for like $15 but they don’t have the encoders. If you have a 3d printer you can print some stuff to attach the encoder, that worked pretty well but it’s more work.

You can also get motors for cheap on aliexpress but they are always different. Some have encoders on em.