Hi all, i’m Luiz and i am the captain of a small combat robot team in Brazil. I was searching about ways to control brushless motor on “low rpm” range and found these awesome library.
In combat robots we gone the brushless route too, but we have some problems, because we need high torque at start up, we can’t just connect the motor to the wheel because the motor jitter and don’t spin. We need to couple with some gearboxes, but it have problems like (pinion slipping, gears stripping, and others).
On the higher weight classes 250lb, like on the show Battlebots, some people use hoverboard motors with Vesc, but for small weight classes like 3lb, an Vesc is impossible to fit.
A guy made a 3lb bot that the can of the brushless motor is the wheel, but his code and electronics is for PhD so he can’t publish. But by that i know that it’s doable, and very high performance.
Long story short, don’t need angle control or very precise position. Just need to have full torque at start. And one fight is about 3min long, it need to work on very high performance for 3min.
My last point is as the name of the sport might sound, sometimes robots get smashed or caught on fire, so major part of us builders don’t want to put high costs components that can break on fight.
Or bulky parts that take huge amount of our weight “budget”.
I want to hear your thoughts about what sensors to put in a application like that, i was thinking about the very cheap arduino encoders, like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Willwin-Measuring-Comparator-Optocoupler-Arduino/dp/B0776RHKB1/ref=sr_1_12?dchild=1&keywords=arduino+encoder&qid=1594698479&sr=8-12
I’m more a Mechanic guy, but understand a little about code and electronic. As for the board to control this, i’m thinking about designing my own. For Beetleweights (3lb) usually 5-10A can handle.
Thanks in advance, i would love to hear from you guys. If you guys want too see what’s like a combat robot here are one video of mine from design to battle, on less than 3min video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vYH10aP6so