Attached is a scope plot taken from a DRV8850EVM without any hardware changes. I've modified the firmware to eliminate PWM and change the speed every 400ms. In the scope plot you can see the direction and speed at the top. The yellow trace is on a 0.7 ohm resistor I placed in series before the power supply ground so you have something like this:
[power supply ground] ----[0.7 resistor]---[circuit ground]
The blue trace is the VPROPI signal. VPROPI shows a peak of about 1.6V or 1.6A since the resistor used on the EVM is a 1k?
The yellow shows 616mV which equates to 880mA (0.616/0.7) so about 1/2? I think I'm having a bad day because I think I've seen this before but I can't recall why I would be measuring 1/2 of the current with this setup.
The bigger question is why is the signal clipped? The power supply is set to trip at 7A so I don't think that is causing an issue. According to Eq. 1 in the datasheet:
2000 x (VCC - 1V) / Iout
The current sense resistor needs to be less than this value. I'm applying 3.7V so this should allow 5.4A if I understand the purpose of VPROPI correctly.
Any insights into this would be greatly appreciated!