Hi all,
i am looking for a solution to control 8 bldc motors for a personal project. But it seems there is so much solutions it's hard to choose one.
My motors are 12V powered, the current peak is 500mA and they turn in only one way. The input signal is PWM.
I read some blog solutions with a SN754410 but as I read in another post, now you give advice by using DRV8x. And the DRV8803 seems to be interesting. Is it possible to control 4 motors with one DRV8803 ?
To do some tests it's possible to get an evaluation module but the price is not the same than one chip. I'll be able to buy an EMV in one month but I would like to know if there is distributors in France.
Thanks for advices.
Florent
Hi Florent,
Did you mean eight brushless DC motors, or eight brushed DC motors? If it is brushed, then the DRV8803 will definitely do the trick. You will need two of these devices and 8 GPIO. If you do not have a lot of GPIO resources, you should also consider the DRV8804 which is basically the same power stage, but with a serial interface instead of a parallel interface. You could cascade two units and send SPI like data into the devices. PWM may be a little bit tough as you will need to send continuous data packets, but is definitely doable.
I personally am not aware of whether there are distributors in France or not, but I feel confident there are many ways in which you can acquire the EVM and the device.
Let us know if there is anything else we can help you with.
Best regards,
Jose Quinones
Hi Jose, thanks to reply.
At the beginning I'd like to make an Arduino's shield to manage some PC fans (and maybe more things). Today, some gamers cases offer the possibility to put a lot of fans in, and it's easy to buy parts to mod a case. Actually it's only a personal project.
A lot of blogs explain how to manage PWM motors with L293D or SN754410, but use new components and technologies are not bad things. I keep the idea to use a DRV8804. I am just understanding how it works. Sure it's (a little) harder to program PWM signals but use only one pin to send signals. I don't need to have a great accuracy to manage fans.
And the choice to use an Arduino board is not definitely (because it seems hard to get informations from SMBus of motherboards with it). I will ask in other section more informations about µc.
Thanks again,
Florent.
Glad to help you with your personal project. Before you go into another forum to post questions, remember you can download the DRV8804EVM CD Image from the DRV8804EVM web page. In this CD image you can find the firmware for the MSP430 microcontroller using PWM outputs (Timers configured as Output Compares) to drive the DRV8803 inputs. The MSP430F2617 microcontroller we used can generate up to 8 PWM outputs and there are some MSP430 microcontrollers with even more timer resources.