Unlike most of my other controllers, the FF series has power and logic integrated on a single board, optimized for size. This is enabled by the TI DRV8301 pre-driver, which so far has been working very well despite my fear of integrated power/signal ICs. Since I haven't had any obvious hardware problems, the only change in the v1.1 minor revision is the layout of the DC bus capacitors:
Instead of two 10mm electrolytic capacitors sticking up at a weird angle, I opted for a bank of large 50V ceramic capacitors, eight in total, on the board. The ceramics are more expenisve, but they should also improve the high frequency filtering of the DC bus. Because they are much higher cost per energy, I also planned to use a single large electrolytic capacitor sticking off the side of the board.
One problem with developing a controller that might be used on a hexrotor is that you need six of them. So, for v1.1, I got a 5x2 panel of boards from MyRO, a not-shady Chinese board manufacturer (~2 week turn). At this point I should thank the folks from FreeFly Cinema who donated the Cinestar frame and backed the first round of FF controller development.
Here's the fresh panel:
The individual boards are v-scored, so they're easy to break apart by hand. One reason I wanted to get the boards as a panel is so that I could batch-process the soldering. And damn, it was a lot of soldering.
I mostly solder everything by hand with a magical Weller WD1001 station, but in order to do the DRV8301's power pads, I used paste and a reflow oven.
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| 95% finished Side 1. This side has the XBee radio headers. |
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| 95% finished Side 2, with the microcontroller and gate driver. |
In total, it took about 14 hours of soldering spread over three days and not including the time to attach wires and connectors to the finished boards. It's probably the second longest soldering job I've ever done. But I think I probably cut the time in half by doing the whole panel at once instead of working with individual boards.
The finished product, without heat shrink covering and connectors, looks like this:
The three blue wires are motor phase outputs, the red and black are DC inputs, and the three-wire connector is the servo-style PWM input. There's also a 6-pin header for programming with an FTDI adapter, although so far I've been programming wirelessly by XBee. In this configuration, the total footprint not including wires is 4.25"x1.5"x0.5". Without the programming header and electrolytic capacitor, the minimum footprint is 3.0"x1.5"x0.5". The weight including wires and connectors is about 65g.
For the six boards that will wind up on the hexrotor, I used IRFS3004-7 FETs (40V, 1.25mΩ) and a 680μF/35V electrolytic capacitor. The remaining four use Infineon FETs, IPB034N06N3 G (60V, 3.4mΩ) and 330μF/63V capacitors. These are prototypes for a higher voltage, lower current version, and in particular I wanted to test them on some ground-based vehicles. I left these four connected from the panel:
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| Quad-core motor controller. |
The reason for this is because I wanted to test them on a 4WD vehicle:
The vehicle, ChibiKart, is a 4WD miniature go-kart with custom in-wheel motors. The controllers are shady eBay specials that do sensorless BLDC at about 25A peak for $28. While I definitely can't compete with them in cost, I can match their power and four FFv1.1 boards could fit in a single one of their enclosures. (I may actually try this, now that I think about it.)
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| It's probably a better idea than a McMaster-Carr bag. |
After some initial testing (video below), the controllers performed well with 25A peak current but had trouble ramp-starting all four motors at the same time. The eBay controllers can do it on level ground, but with limited torque for the first instant while the back EMF zero crossings are still noisy. My eventual goal is to have a sensorless start at full rated torque, although it may require more than simple open-loop ramping. For scooter (or e-bike) use, the simple ramp start or a manual push start would be sufficient.
Like most of my motor controllers, FFv1.1 is set up for wireless data acquisition. Here's some data from one of ChibiKart's test runs:
The regenerative braking on pedal lift had a nice feel. I'm eager to implement a better ramp-start and get tinyKart running on sensorless DirectDrive like I've been saying I would do for months.
But for now, back to multirotors. The main purpose for the other six FFv1.1 boards is to test fly on the Cinestar 6 hexrotor. Before I feel comfortable enough to do that, though, I decided I should flight test the controllers on my Turnigy Talon quadrotor. It's a much more manageable size (500mm from center-to-center), but it can carry a substantial payload so it wouldn't mind the extra weight of large controllers and heavy-gauge wiring.
I was going to heat shrink the controllers, but decided to leave them bare for testing until I'm confident they don't have any bad solder joints. So, I just zip-tied them to the frame for now:
To accommodate the output signal from the KK multirotor control board, I wrote a simple PWM input routine using a spare timer on the STM32. It measures pulse length and adjusts voltage magnitude directly (no current control.) However, the voltage phase is still feedback-controlled to keep d-axis current at zero. This is a unique control scheme not possible with normal Field-Oriented Control. It should retain the "feel" of an airplane-style RC ESC but have optimal torque per amp at all speeds.
For the PWM input, I used a digital low-pass filter to limit the spin-up rate of the motors. I initially did this in lieu of current control to limit the maximum amount of current the motors would see under normal operation. However, after flying with a relatively fast input filter (τ = 33ms), I encountered the other reason why one might want to filter the input: vibration noise.
The PWM input under hover conditions would actually fluctuate by about +/-50μs (+/-8% of full range). This noise is almost certainly from the gyros on the KK board, and I don't blame the cheap controller because I had major gyro noise issues with the Pololu minIMU-9 too on 4pcb. Gyro noise due to mechanical vibration has been by far the most hassling part of building multirotors for me. In any case, it was actually beneficial to increase the input filter time constant to about 50ms and turn down the control gains slightly to reduce how much the ESCs would amplify the gyro noise.
Lastly, video of both ground and air testing:
So far the controllers are working as planned. This marks the first time I've ever tested eight controllers in one day without blowing anything up.
Celebrate at Beijing Tokyo!
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