Tronic's AMC motor motion-controller with pwm/servo output

I'm also trying to figure out a way of converting the ponyprog circuit so I can interface it to FT232R too with the use of some switches. All the RS232 control lines are available thru FT232R chip...

So the next version of the AMC will be entirely USB compatible! You will be able to program it and sent data to it from only a simple USB cable! :yippiee:

Regards, Thanos

hi everybody...


since i am using a huge motor i decided to search for a commercial solution. i found this h-bridge (http://wiki.tuttoelettronica.org/index. ... Ponte_V3.1)

it is an italian project so you probably wont find any english documentation. but it shouldnt be a problem to translate it with babelfish. it can hold up to 1kw of continuous drain, and you can directly attach a current measurement. you can find it as a kit to buy. it supports up to 40A and from 12 to 48V. its relatively cheap. the question is: is it compatible with tronics controller? if not, there is its own controller: is that one compatible with the simulation software?

thank you

igor

Hi Igor,

In place of IRF4905 you can use the equivalent STMicroelectronis STP80PF55 as R-eng did and worked fine for him. Or search for other equivalent mosfets with more Amp rating that are available to stores near you...

As for the RoboPonte_V3.1 you mention, it seems to work as my DSmhb, one enable line, two direction inputs... But I don't think you can draw continuous more than 40A in 12volts with this circuit without strong cooling mounted on it... but you can try! It uses nice and expensive mosfet drivers that I suppose make it less inclined to failure during switching loads... And it uses fast recovery Zener Transient Voltage Suppressors, that make it less likely to short circuit the h-bridge ... If its cheap you can give it a try!

EDIT: I located the kit here: http://66.163.168.225/babelfish/transla ... dotto.html
Its rather expensive for me: 67,00€ And it can drive only one motor!
(My DSMhb costs 40,00€ and can drive two motors!!)


Regards, Thanos

hi thanos.

i spoke to a robotic engeneer and he said (i hav eno clue if it is true or not since my robotic cnowledge is below 0) that your bridge works fine for small motors, but due to the different types of mosfets, it cant work with bigger motors. because on every switch there is a craction of moment witha short circuit, and the high loads causesome sort of unwanted signals or something like that. im not sure that i got it right, but it was something like that. he also said that this bridge (roboponte) is designed to wrok with big motors like mine. again i have no clue if this is true or not and i dont want to discuss about your electronic skills. sicne what you did obviously wors and many are using it. regarding the cheap, yes yours is cheaper, but for my electronic skills and the smoking elements i had it is quite expensive. i studied mecahnics and not electronics so for me its easy to break something. at the end for me it costs way more then the roboponte.

what i would like to understand is if the signal i get from your controller is compatible with roboponte, since on this image: http://wiki.tuttoelettronica.org/images ... laggio.png there is written that the two pwm signals have to be shifted by 90°. moreover i have no idea on how many mhz it can handle. the pololu that would fit my motor supports only up to 10 mhz.

regards

igor

oki i think that i will buy the roboponte and replace the irf44 with 4 of these:

http://www.katodo.com/shop/mosfet-e-tra ... dotto.html

that way i will be more then fine with my huge motor. the only thing that worries me now is the pwm signal. i dont know if it is compatible.

regards

igor

sharky
From memory I think I read somewhere in Thanos earlier post he said he tested or was going to test the H-Bridge up to 20khz switching speeds on an oscilloscope and the logic timing was sweet. His design modification is based off a proven kit which hasn't had bad feedback in the years it has been sold. If you want to load up more amps just parallel the fets and cool it more (bigger fan, water plumbing, bigger heatsink etc)
The only thing different I'd change if I could be bothered would be to opto-isolate the logic to the fet's, else it is a sweet board!

Hi to all.

Since my AMC and DSMhb boards require some soldering skills to be assembled and prevent possible problems from bad or cold solder joints, I found some soldering guides that are very useful to everyone!!

Here is a How and WHY to Solder Correctly guide:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NU2ruzyc4

And here a Soldering Iron Wattage vs. Temperature guide to help understand the differences between various solder iron tools!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vh9pWu6K6tc

Regards, Thanos

Hi all,

first, a big :clap: for the project.

It will be test soon in France. With 4 friends, we are ready to make the system.

We have some questions :

- it seems to me, there is some errors in the last part list of the AMC board :
- 6 Res 10k Ohm 1/4w, 1% (5 in the part list)
- i don't see the Res 10 Ohm 1/4w, 1% on the sprint layout
- 2 Res 470 Ohm 1/4w, 1% (1 in the part list)
- 3 LEDs (2 in the part list)

could you confirm please ?

have you more informations for LEDs or it's not important ? 1.5 @ 20 mA could be ok ?


And the big question : What is better for the controller ? HB-25, RN-VN2 or your DSMhb board ?


We work on the motion seat too, and we'll send you our plan for the seat.
We have several improvements for it (location motors, etc ...).

Thanks and :thbup: for Thanos and all guys who work on the project.

(sorry for my english)

T4zt00n (for the made in France)

- Yes its 6 Res 10k Ohm 1/4w, 1%. I forgot the one I use for the reset line, Thanks
- The Res 10 Ohm 1/4w, 1% is for the small Parallel LCD board (that is optional to make in PCB, as it could be made in protoboard easily)
- Yes its 2 Res 470 Ohm 1/4w, 1%, I added the second on later for the Hyperterminal motor setting...
- Yes its 3 LEDs, again the third was added later as a fix to inconsisted communication on the 115Kbps serial...

Yes, 1.5 @ 20 mA Leds will do fine. Using brigher leds though needs bigger resistor values!

I have not adapted HB-25 use on my AMC board yet, but it will not big job to do as they are driven as servos. But since they have no internal position system of their own, I have to use AMC's potentiometer feedback to convert them to real servos!!! And I'm not sure if its worth to use them after all. They produce whining sound as they run and can't be used with motors that have bigger voltage than 12volts!!! Same thing applies to the RN-VN2 controller about the sound and the 12volts limitation, plus I have shown in the past that they cannot run smoothly in 22-24Khz PWM signal...

We'd like to see your improvements shown here in the forum in a new thread describing your project!

Best Regards, Thanos

Hello all from Turkey. I am the new kid on the simulator madness. I am very exited to site. I want to make a simulator a years, when i found this website my first job is making the tronicgr 's PCB immediately. I make the all PCB 's (thanks to toner transfer method). I drilled them and waiting Atmega 8535 i cant found my local shop and make order to a website. When avaliable i take some photos of homemade PCB 's. I also asking local car shops, wiper motors. It has a very different prices gaps. Include 15 USD to 200 USD (Mercedes and BMW ones :lol: ).

Thanks to all. Stay online .

Mutlu

Hello Thanos,
great job you have here done :clap:
I am a simracer from Germany and I will rebuilt your AMC motion-controller for my SimForceGT like Ego`s.
Today the pcb is arrived and I will start.
I hope you can help me if I have question.

sorry for my english

regards
christian

I think that you may be pleased to hear about the progress on the development of optical encoder support for AMC1.5.

I made custom quadrature decoder controller based on a ATtiny2313 that reads and decodes the signals from an Optical Encoder. The ATtiny2313 runs on 20Mhz crystal that means that can deliver 20MIPS processing power!!! Its output is parallel to be able to read it as fast is possible (I measured 20 uS access time for retrieving a 16bit value).

I plan to interface it on AMC1.5 by using another ATtiny2313 that will be an I2C slave device with transfer rate of the maximum speed of 400kHz. Then with only two wires you could connect up to 8 ATtiny2313 quadrature decoder controllers in the same two I2C ports of the AMC1.5. Addressing is not an issue as each I2C slave device can have DIP switch selected address.

As this decoder is 16bit and allows 65535 positions, I will also alter the AMC1.5 firmware to support 16bit input for the position values. As you may notice this will work only with x-sim² Profiler2, that its new USO module can send 16bit values (the old profiler1.8 can send only 8bit values)

Anyway for the development I used an HEDS 9100 (500 cpr) quadrature optical encoder that is attached on a FESTO DC servo motor that Monast send me recently, to help me with project. As the motor has planetary gear ratio of 1/13.73 , I read 6865 positions per full revolution of the output axis. The datasheet of the motor which I took apart is this one: http://www.festo.com/INetDomino/files_0 ... PSI-US.PDF

Now comes the fun part: The motor itself has 6096 RPM speed and since the optical encoder disk is 500 cpr I have to read 3048000 positions per minute or 50800 positions per second if the motor runs in full speed!!!!!! Guess what! I tried it and it works!!! The ATtiny2313 quadrature encoder controller doesn't miss a pulse!!!!!

These are some photos of the breadboarded ATtiny2313 decoder circuit, interfaced directly (in parallel mode) to the AMC. As you can see it took all the eight ADC ports and all the four RC servo ports to interface it, that is impractically for only one quadrature decoder, that's why I will interface it thru I2C in the final.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qmNt4erRXc


For better resolution of the video click below and choose Watch in high quality
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qmNt4erRXc


Best Regards, Thanos :



Notice to all that I have send me email these days and didn't answer them yet: Sorry you guys, I rather prefer using my spare time on development of these cool electronics, than spending endless time on replying on matters that already are answered here in this thread. I try to reply some of them slowly when I'm not at home, but the queue of emails seems to increase day by day :dntknw:

AMC with 16bit encoder 8)

:hi: Tronic Got another question and realise you have a backlog of E-mails from eager customers so answer if and when you can .. While still waiting for some of the other elements for my 2DOF Simforce GT type sim i thought i would use the time to make a Working model based on RC servos just to learn about how to Properly setup and get X-Sim running with Your Electronics, have seen the stuff that you and Plannmix have done and wondered if you had a block diagram to show how the servos need to be connected and any notes on getting the model running before i connected my big motors ( do i need 2 PC networked etc ... PS may have to change the electric Wheel chair Motors back to Wiper motors on my design because i found some more info on the motors and they seem to indicate 26Amps ( and double ) so i may be pushing my luck trying to use the Dual H Bridge card to drive these.. Shame as i thought that with the built in electric brake and gearbox these motors would be easly provide the motion i needed Dammmm.. Still Not the end of the world as they will be used for the Plane sim .. :yippiee:

How hard is curent limiter ? If you insert it in front of H-bridge than you have confidence that you dont destroy it.

For current limit you can use some car fuses in the power line, just before the hbridge power input...

post6629.html#p6629


@wannabeaflyer
You cannot use the simple RC servos on the h-bridge!!!! They have their own hbridge inside them!!!

On the other hand you can modify them! You can strip its electronics board and leave in the case only the motor and the potentiometer! Then you will have four cables coming out of each modified rc servo, two from the motor and two from the potentiometer... You can then connect them to the H-bridge exactly as the large motors!!! The only thing to worry then is to match the direction of the motor with the direction of the potentiometer!


Regards, Thanos

Many thanks for the info thanos, went to a model aircraft show last week and bought some cheap servos there with just this project in mind so will pull them apart ( Carefully ) and see how it goes.. ps got all the bits to Build your H bridge circuit at last so will keep you posted :

Well i mean it more like restriction. For example H bridge can take 10A and motor on stall 20A so if you set limiter to 10A you cant burn hbridge (but you got only 1/2 of motor torque)

Hi Thanos,

Haven't posted for a while but read everytime there is a new post.

Just wanted to update you on my progress.

First of all, I have build the Mjoy and flashed it (had a few problems flashing it but all done and recognised by the computer)

Built the controller and the H-bridge boards. Had a problem at first, the led on the Rx molex side didn't light up. It still flashed but the LCD lit but didn't show anything.

After much problem solving, turned out the be the molex cable I built (Rx), the center pin wasn't contacting properly. Also made the mistake of running on 12vdc instead of 5 to 9. (yes the magic smoke escaped out of the 1000uf cap closest to the power plug)

Used this board to flash the MJoy as well. Took me a while to find out that the USB needs to be connected when flashing the MJoy.

One issue I appear to be having, the LCD is very slow to respond for example, if I push the Alps reset button, it can take around 10 seconds plus to respond, then it says START for about 10 to 15 seconds then display the firmware details.

Is this normal or do you recognise a problem?

Thanks again for your great work.

David
Australia