Triple ESC

A very common combat robot configuration is dual brushed drive and a single brushless weapon. With this in mind, I set out to design a single controller that would be able to have all of this functionality in a smaller, more cost effective, and importantly more robust package.

This new board is compromised of two major components, the dual brushed controller and sensorless BLDC (Brushless Direct Current) controller. I decided to use my existing dual brushed design and simply integrate it with a new BLDC controller. To save myself time and frustration, the brushless controller was designed around an existing firmware called SimonK.

The power stage was designed around fairly cheap but powerful mosfets PSMN1R0-30YLD. The mosfets were driven by the lm5109a half bridge driver. Using those drivers, 3s (11.1v) lipos are supported without any additional circuitry for stepping down the battery voltage. After some testing, 4s lipos were found to be incompatible without additional regulation. Rev 1.1 will include a switching regulator to allow for up to 6s operation.

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Above is the full board assembled and hooked up to a standard rc receiver.

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Above are two pictures of the board installed in an ant weight (1lb) plastic robot. This allows for easy setup and space saving since the board provides power to the receiver.