Electronics > Electronics

Controlling Electric Motors from a PC

<< < (2/2)

Daanii:
Certainly building something yourself will be cheapest. But in that case you will also need to do a lot of work and testing. So you save in money at the expense of time and effort learning how to build a motor controller. (Of course, if one of your goals is to learn about motor controllers, building your own is certainly a good way to do that.)

The Pololu Simple Motor Controller I mentioned above is an off-the-shelf solution that will save you a lot of time, and probably not be much more expensive anyway. Pololu has all the software you need on its website. You just hook up the controller to your PC using a USB cable, send it a speed command through USB, and you are all set.

If you need some feedback from the motor/propeller assembly (and it looks like you do, since you mentioned getting the tilt angle), then the Arduino microcontroller mentioned by joe61 will be helpful. The Arduino can easily read in sensor input from an accelerometer, process it, and adjust the speed signal to the motor controller accordingly. Using a PC to do that will be much harder.

In my case, I used an Arduino to get an analog signal from a potentiometer and used that to generate a speed signal to the Pololu Simple Motor Controller. I just used the serial data communications link. It worked pretty well.

I did have problems with electrical noise, though, so you will need to watch that. That's why I wondered how you will power the motor. If you try to power your motor and your digital electronics off the same power supply, you may have problems.  

Soeren:
Hi,


--- Quote from: DonQuigleone on October 05, 2011, 11:40:26 AM ---I'm still not exactly sure how powerful the motor needs to be. The propeller is only going to be 20 mm in diameter at most, so the motor only needs to operate fast enough to be within the propeller's operating range.

--- End quote ---
Do you at least know the amount of lift you need?
That's the first thing to decide, as this will define what power and speed you need from the motor.

hobbes:
If you want cheap ( free ) consider using the current from the sound card to control the motor. Now the sound card was not designed to do this but you can output a steady sound and control it's volume using a software API such as PortAudio or OpenAL.

 

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[*] Previous page