The Perfect Open Source Controller for Powerful Electric Motors

By on September 13, 2017
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For anyone with interest in electric vehicles, especially drives and control systems for EV’s, the Endless-Sphere forum is the place to frequent. It’s full of some amazing projects covering electric skateboards to cars and everything in between. Marcos Chaparro recently posted details of his controller project — the VESC-controller, an open source controller capable of driving motors up to 200 hp.

Marcos’s VESC-controller uses 600 V 600 A IGBT modules and 460 A current sensors capable of powering BLDC motors up to 150 kW.
Since the control logic is seperated from the gate drivers and IGBT’s, it’s possible to adapt it for high power applications.

He is already thinking about removing all the analog sensing in favour of using voltage and current sensors with digital outputs for the next revision.
Marcos is also working on refining a reference design for a power interface board that includes gate drivers, power mosfets, DC link and differential voltage/current sensing.
With better sensors and a beefier power stage, the same control board should work for motors in excess of 500 hp.

All design files are available on the Github repository and on endless-sphere.com forum you can find all the informations you need.

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