Hey all, I'm fairly new to the Arduino but I'm hoping to use it to control the speed of an electric motor. The motor is a brushless type and is being driven using a radio control helicopters electronic speed control. Traditionally this would plug into a servo port on a reciever and recieve its signal through the 3 wire cable plugged into the port.
Is there any way to simulate the output of a reciever to basically control the ESC? I would like to basically be able to use a rotary potentiometer to control the ESC's throttle between 0-100%.
assuming that you have the ESC and an Arduino and downloaded the IDE forarduino (0018 or 0017).
It's just a matter of look at the examples that came with the IDE about controlling servos, signal for servos and ESC is the same http://www.arduino.cc/playground/ComponentLib/Servo
Do NOT power the motor with the arduino as it can only support 5V and 20mA, the esc uses 17A or more at 7 to 12 volts
Thanks for that. Ok this sounds fairly doable then.... famous last words!
It's actually going to be used to control the speed of the motor to maintain a preset boost pressure (it is driving the compressor side of a turbocharger).
So once I've got the basics of controlling the speed and communicating with the ESC I'll have to try and write a PID style control program.
It's actually going to be used to control the speed of the motor to maintain a preset boost pressure (it is driving the compressor side of a turbocharger).
An electric turbocharger?
After researching such a thing on the internet (I was thinking about doing some stupid on my 4-banger Ranger), I seem to recall that they don't move enough air to make a difference on engine intake pressure (most auto forums seemed to believe they fell into the same snake oil as the "hydro boost" things - just another way to part your money).
I did the maths on a forum years ago. I found out how much power it took to drive a mechanical supercharger and then worked out how many watts a electric version would have to consume. It was just silly.
FYI: basically it is being used to turbocharge a 250cc four stroke KTM engine. This means that the amount of air that needs to be pumped is quite low (finding a damn turbo that was small enough was the problem!). In terms of power required to move that air I've calculated that to maintain 7 psi of boost up to about 8000 rpm would require 1.49kW. At least that's what the sums say...
This motor is rated to 4.2kW and the speedo can push 80 amps and 50 Volts. I'll let you all know how it goes!
