2‐3‐2024 ‐ DC Motor Testing

DC Motor was tested today and it proved to work.

Equipment

We are using the following equipment:

• ESC
• DC Motor Brushless
• Arduino UNO
• DC Voltage Supply

Circuit

The circuit was the following:

flowchart LR
uno[Arduino UNO]
dc[DC Power Supply]
m[Brushless DC Motor]
esc[ESC]
uno --> |A0 to ESC signal|esc
uno --> |5V to 5V|esc
uno --> |GND to GND|esc
dc --> |18v to ESC Vin|esc
dc--> |GND to esc GND|esc
esc --> m

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Images

Code

In order to control the DC motor speed with an Arduino we had to implement our own basic PWM. Even though an Arduino has PWM functionality already, the delay between pulses is apparently not enough for the motor to detect it as something between 0 and 5V, however with our own implementation we define what's the delay between a HIGH and the delay between a LOW and from there create an artificial PWM:

// Pin for PWM output
const int pwmPin = 9;
const int highDelay = 50;
const int lowDelay = 50;

void setup() {
  // Set the PWM pin as an output
  Serial.begin(9600);
  pinMode(A0, OUTPUT);
}

bool iter = false;

void loop() {
  // Output the PWM signal
  int val = 255;
  int del = highDelay;
  if(iter) val = 0;
  if(iter) del = lowDelay;
  analogWrite(A0, val);
  iter = !iter;
  
  // Delay for demonstration purposes
  delay(del); // Adjust as needed
}

Results

VID_20240203_185131.1.mp4

NOTES:

From testing we realized the slowest the motor could run without significant vibrations due to our custom PWM is a delay of 50ms for the HIGH and 50ms for the low. If you were to dramatically increase that ratio of DelayHigh:DelayLow, like 500ms for delay HIGH and 1ms for delay Low then we could achieve back again max speed.