WS55-180/220 PWM Control

I see on the site that some o y'all wanted to control the BLDC driver with PWM, it is possible to do it directly, but if you want to go 5VDC PWM then you will need to modify the board, my method works directly from 3v3 but it could work for 5VDC if the GPIO of an STM32F is 5V tolerant and the ADC is capable of reading it... I would not recommend it, use ohms law, kill the diode and work out what resistor value to replace the existing one, or use a Logic Level Shifter, but you could do that with the 10VDC rail regardless, and you could also use one for the ALARM pin, it goes high at 13VDC which would work great for PLC but TTL/CMOS not so much.

So as I am a high on the spectrum there is nothing I buy and don't take apart... it is an involuntary reflex. I needed to drive a sensorless BLDC for a compressor but I needed to add PID for exact air capacity, I did not want to use a digipot, so I decided to see what is going on under the hood.

Well it is really quite simple. there is a STM32F providing 3 PWM to a gate driver, there is feed back for the zero crossing blah blah blah, it is as you would expect.

The unit is marked 10V on the case, but the board is marked 5V, which got me thinking, so I traced pin 6 the speed pin, met a diode then a resistor and then a GPIO of the STM32... so I bypassed the diode and resistor and plonked a 3v3 PWM signal directly on it, low and behold I could take it to 100% DC and spin my motor to 3000RPM, I then decided to mock up a quick push button affair and I was able to fully control the motor, from a PWM signal generated from the MCU.

This is most likely going to be an obscure topic, but if there is any interest I am happy to publish my bodge, but I am also working on my own BLDC driver based on the new STM32F platform which I am happy to open source.

I am old school, been designing IC since 1998 and I truly believe in community and open-source, it is how we all move technology on, it is not for profit, if you want to be rich, don't be an engineer, if you want to make a difference then engineering is for you!

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.