Brickscooter is a...thing...first documented here.
With two weeks to go before the due date (yes, that thing was homework), it was time to punt life, hide at MITERS, and build build build!
And so here's the saga of how I built, destroyed, rebuilt, redestroyed, repaired, and destroyed yet again, a 300A 3-phase motor controller. Oh, and there was a scooter attached to it too.
Day 1: Nothing exciting here, panic mode had yet to set in, so I finished machining my busbars.
Day 2: ...and, Digi-Key fails at 2-day shipping when I need it most. WHERE ARE MY GATE DRIVERS???
Day 3: Why hello there, gate drivers! The driver chip I'm used was the IR2183, a 2A bootstrapped half-bridge driver. After all that ranting about high performance gate drives, I'm using 2A to drive a brick. Fortunately, this is not too bad as the MOSFETs I was using have a gate charge of a few hundred nC. Turn-on times in the microsecond range are acceptable when the fastest I'd ever be PWM'ing is 10 KHz. The microcontroller I'm using is the Mbed, a 96 MHZ Cortex-M3 on a cute little board. It comes with a not-terribly-useful-but-still-acceptable online compiler, and, more importantly, has nice firmware that makes it easy to program (as well as being broken out into a DIP form factor).
After a moment of extreme derp when I realized my gate resistors were off by a factor of 4 (I'm used to 9A drivers), I had working drivers and a controller board etched and ready to go.
Day 4: I ♥ this document soooo much. It even gives you the commutation table! A little code later, I had a working motor controller. Well, it didn't work the first time, but after a bit of swapping of phases I had the motor turning, albeit without PWM. This lead into...Day 5: ...as I stayed up for 30+ hour trying to get the thing ready for the "official" vehicle checkoff time. Turns out machining after drinking a quart of Monster is hard. I ended up getting it running under its own power at out 9PM that night, but I deemed it too dangerous to take it for a maiden voyage (it still had no PWM), so I went to bed.
Day 6: More code resulted in a working PWM controller. Remarkably uneventful day here, nothing to see.
Day 7: I had a completed scooter! Or did I? One of the motor leads fell off during testing, resulting in a voltage spike that avalanched one of my MOSFETs and killed it. I replaced the FET, and it kind of worked.
The hard thing about debugging a 3-phase motor controller is that it has numerous failure modes, most of which do not result in the motor not turning. A lot of these failure modes are akin to the loss of phase, upon which the motor will continue to turn, but loudly and inefficiently. I replaced the other transistor from the failed phase, and all was well.
I actually rode brickscooter that night, but the throttle was real sketchy (seeing as it was a 10-turn trimpot).
Day 8: Hmm, I blew up the motor controller and I don't know why. Oh well, replace everything and try again. I realized I had serious belt slippage issues, so I attempted to redo the drivetrain, and mostly succeeded.
Day 9: Oh hi there, uninflated tire! Inflating the tire was harder than anticipated, especially since I had punctured the tube in multiple places from doing burnouts while it was uninflated. I disassembled the drivetrain and replaced the wheel. Unfortunately, I also bumped one of my non-circularly-symmetric standoffs, and shot through a phase of the controller. Replaced it, and spent the night trying to sort out the remainder of my drivetrain issues. While testing the drivetrain (and doing burnouts in the hallway), I did The Thing again, and bumped another standoff. Fixed that AGAIN, and this time, the controller failed for mysterious reasons. Replaced it again, and I went to bed with a working scooter.
Day 10: I had another weird failure, where the MOSFET would die with the gate failed dead short. I spent the night frantically trying to figure out why it was happening (I was running out of transistors at this point!). This had happened several times previously, and I had just shrugged it off.
Day 11: Found an error in the commutation table, which explained some of the failures. At this point, the bridge was probably half sketchy transistors, so I no longer dared to run it at full power before getting it checked off. Yes, sometimes I do care about grades...
Day 12: Got it checked off, and suddenly realized that the wire loop going from my batteries to the bridge probably had several microhenries of inductance. At 80A/uS dI/dt. that translated into perhaps a couple hundred volts of ringing, enough to break down the bricks. sigh the one time I don't use a giant buscap on the bridge, it bites me in the ass. I also concluded that too many brave transistors had given their lives in my quest to troll 2.007, so I stopped working on the scooter. Perhaps someday, in late June, I'll finish it, though that realistically means "sometime in the next two years I'll try to finish it".
And so ends the story of Brickscooter. Thirteen brave MOSFETs gave their lives, and the scooter still stands unfinished. The moral of the story? BUSCAP!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment