Hi all, I’ve been lurking around here for a year or so now and I’m pretty excited to kick off my project. In all honesty, I’m pushing it forward under pressure of dwindling component stocks. Wanna get drivers while I still can! I have a stupid amount of questions rattling around in my head, but this is the biggest one for me. Any thoughts appreciated
The scenario is, driving a high power motor against a wildly varying load which frequently holds the motor stationary or back-drives it. The motor is driving the load directly and will never rotate further than 90 degrees at most.
As I understand it (not much, so please stop me if I’m wrong) holding the motor at stall will lead to the windings overheating and the death of my motor, and the way to deal with this is current monitoring and chopping the signal to maintain a sustainable current through the windings. As far as I can tell, current mode FOC has been added to simplefoc recently, but I read something about it only monitoring total current through the motor, not per-phase, and I’m not sure that information is up to date? I’m also not sure exactly how this all handles the motor randomly trying to be a generator?
My gameplan at the moment was to use simplefoc’s current mode FOC, with a rotary hall encoder, and an inline current sensor on each motor… But I’m not sure it’s quite so simple. I can’t help but wonder if temperature sensors or braking resistors or who-knows-what else are needed for something like this.
Also, I gather that some of these features are not quite fully ready yet, and I am keen to be involved in that process. I’m decent with embedded C code and a soldering iron, but my wallet is a little light to blow anything up… I’m OK with microcontrollers but motors are voodoo to me so not sure what the risks are here.
Thanks for any advice!