Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

wolsue — Tue, 12 May 2020 19:18:49 GMT

I wonder where are the encoder connected ?? Where is the result of the rotation?. The subject says DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

bobcroft — Sat, 14 Mar 2020 10:48:05 GMT

I am not surprised that the view numbers for non Arduino processors are low since some of the others mentioned are not widely used or supported. I would suggest that the ESP32 would be a good choice as it is more powerful than anything but the latest Arduinos, it has massive support and a very substantial amount of Arduino code can be ported to it. I would be very interested to know if it is possible to have realistic motor encoder decoding on an ESP32 device. I guess it would depend on the motor shaft speed. This is just my personal opinion

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

robogary — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 04:15:54 GMT

I'm very interested in how it goes for you. All the commercially available Raspberry Pi robot kits use a I2C interface board for h bridges , encoders, and aux IO.

Donkey Car, Dexter, etc....ad naseum

Donkey car is the vision based autonomous driving using Raspberry pi.

Myself, it thought it would be easier to hardwire an H bridge control from GPIO, but move all the other sensors to I2C. At the end, I2C is probably better for everything to avoid discrete GPIO.

I have built some bigger vehicles using Power Wheel Cars as the chassis, using generic 50A H bridges.

I do want any i2C board to provide external analog outputs to allow me to drive bigger H bridges with direction bits and PWM :-)

I am especially interested how you design the I2C and code the PI for it. I wanted to do a similar project to yours, and include commercially available sensors, but havent got past the point of asking the Pi for all the I2C drop numbers.

good Luck, we all are watching with great interest.

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

DAB — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 19:48:20 GMT

Good post.

DAB

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

shabaz — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 15:13:41 GMT

Hi Frank,

Great project! I think you did the right thing choosing a powerful ARM chip. Easier to later simplify. I used a MSP430 DIL package device for my hobby-servo controller, but later regretted it due to lack of resources for all the extras I wished to add later : (

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

dubbie — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 13:36:02 GMT

I've been interstedin motors, especially DC motors for a while. I made one out of Lego and wire, plus magnets many years ago and I was astonished that it actually worked. Later I made a much larger open frame DC motor of about 25 cm diameter, using plasma cut laminations. It worked but not as well as I had hoped as the plasma cutter just wasn't accurate enough to produce perfectly round laminations so the air gap varied 1-2 mm which prevented me getting a really small air gap. Plus the laminations warped. I had a very chunky power supply so didn't have to worry too much about the number of turns in the windings. It went round relatively well as some speed, but had quite a poor torque output. It also made a great deal of noise when run to the limits so everyone stood well clear. Still, it didn't actually explode so I was very pleased. Nowadays I stick to the smaller DC motors such as you are using and I will be very interested to see how you implement I2C control as well as P and I methods.

Dubbie

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

Jan Cumps — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 11:44:05 GMT

The startup ramp at 2:20 seems to be the startup ramp of the PSU. I'd expect that ramp to be non-existing if the encoder is powered by a separate supply that has stabilised. You'd only see a difference in frequency of the decoder signals.

edit: you want to use the two signals from the encoder because they will give you direction and will by default help with switch bounce issues.

RE: Simple Arduino DC Motor Control with Encoder, Part 1

Andrew J — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 10:09:34 GMT

I shall follow along with interest - I’d like to have a go at a simple robot and motor drive this year.