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Roger-random / Sawppy_Rover

Sawppy the Rover: A Motorized Model of Mars Rover Curiosity and Perseverance for <$500 In Parts
http://sawppy.com
MIT License
441 stars 84 forks source link

Interest in supporting BLDC motors? #27

Closed samuk closed 2 years ago

samuk commented 2 years ago

Hi would you be interested in working on BLDC motor support? I'd personally be interested in the Ros2 version, but Arduino control may be possible too?

More on the idea here: https://github.com/mgonzs13/ros2_rover/issues/2

Roger-random commented 2 years ago

I have no objection to BLDC motor support, but it won't be the highest priority for development. In order to verify and test the functionality, I'll have to buy BLDC motors and controllers myself. I can't justify that expense at the moment.

I followed your link and I see pointers to motors designed for camera gimbal mounts. Usually, such motors are not suited for driving vehicle wheels due to low torque. Do you plan to use a gearbox?

I am suspicious of the motor specifications listed. It says "230g" of torque, but grams are the wrong unit to express torque.

nbering commented 2 years ago

I'm interested in at least giving it a try. I'm planning to order a few BLDC motors and something to control them, to do some controlled experimentation for my own experience.

My focus with BLDC research so far has been for field-oriented-control on actuators for an arm. Simply replacing the serial drive servos isn't something I'd investigated yet, but since a simple ESC reduces the complexity over FOC application boards, it might be more economical for wheel drive than what I'd been seeing for actuators.

Most controllers I'd seen were 1 or 2 channels, though. So that'd be my next concern after torque - that the electronics might get a little complex and/or specialized.

samuk commented 2 years ago

@Roger-random Thanks, I'll poke at the idea a bit and see if we can get something working. I opened a discussion here https://github.com/Roger-random/Sawppy_Rover/discussions/30 if anyone wants to chat further on it.

@nbering one of the ideas with https://rosmo.io/ is that the driver boards are 'stackable' on the M5stack profile so we hope we could stack 3x of the ESC boards on a single ESP32 for 6x6 control. This is all theoretical at this point. But we hope it's going to work! Ordering the first batch of boards some time next week.