A few weeks ago, I finally got around to testing the thrusters on the ferry boat. These are very small thrusters meant for a small ROV (remote operated vehicle), but I don’t intend the ferry boat to go very fast. First we mounted a simple arcade joystick into a box with a microcontroller and connected…
How to figure out the wiring of any BLDC motor quickly and easily (technical)
We had some breakthroughs with BLDC motor drive control last week. I’ll try to summarize it here as much for my own records as for anyone else. So feel free to skip if you aren’t interested. But if you are, please read on. In particular, I came up with a very easy way to figure…
Slow but steady progress on the BLDC motor drive circuit [technical]
Things have been going a bit slowly on building the BLDC drive circuit for the ferry boat propeller motors. Mostly this has been due to being busy with other things. But nonetheless we’ve been making slow but steady progress over the past few weeks. One recent big help was the purchase of a new oscilloscope….
Solar powered pump controller upgraded
Almost exactly a year ago, the prototype for the solar powered pump controller was installed and working. It was a hand wired and soldered on a perf board but it worked fairly well. But it is usually good to switch to printed circuit boards (PCBs) once the design has stabilized. We actually printed these a…
BLDC motor drive circuit success!
I got the chance to test the BLDC driver circuit that we finished recently, and after minimal fixes to the commutation code in the microcontroller, it works! I’m pretty excited about this. 🙂 Here is the setup we used: The 12V car battery at the top is supplying the power for the microcontroller which is…
Back to the BLDC motor drive circuit
The motors we mounted onto the ferry boat are brushless DC (BLDC) motors. Until now, I haven’t actually successfully built a BLDC motor drive circuit. Mostly it is because we’ve been busy with a hundred other things. But now that the motors are mounted on the ferry boat, and we have to start thinking about…
Mounting drive motors to the ferry boat
The ferry boat has been completed in an unpowered form for quite some time now. More recently, I’ve been waiting for the welders to weld on the motor and propeller shaft mounting so that we can begin doing powered tests. I wanted to the welders to focus on the welding of the structure of BaanLoiNaam,…
Driving a BLDC motor
I’ve been wanting to experiment with brushless DC (BLDC) motors for some time now. Today, I finally got the chance to write the microcontroller firmware to do the logic. We are still waiting on some electronics to build the 3 half bridges needed to do the power side. But we pretty much finished the control…
Ferry boat update
It took a little longer than I expected to get the coupling between the motors and propeller shafts for the ferry boat. The first few machine shops we spoke to didn’t seem interested in the order. But we found one on our side of the river but almost an hour away (in Bang Bon). So…
Solar panel electricity in low light conditions
I posted yesterday about getting the second pump shed wired up to solar panels. One interesting tidbit I noticed when checking it around dusk was the fact that the panels were generating electricity quite late in the day. Here is a picture of how low the sun was relative to the panels: Here is the…
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