Senior Progress

It's pretty obvious that posts on here have slowed since Tyler and I went back to school, so I figure I should show you a little of what I've been up to. This semester, I get up and drive to campus for class and in between/before/after class I spend time working on my senior project which is a brushless motor controller. Basically I am trying to be like 1/16th as good at this guy. I took a couple of pictures though to show our progress a little, the pictures don't really do justice the time we have put in so far but hey that's how this whole learning thing goes right?

I've been S-T-RUGGLIN' on this PWM thing on the AVR, got some test code working but can't seem to the frequency to be what I want. This will be that piece that drives the gates in our half bridge circuits. Checkout my old school O-scope in my room, awh yeah.

 Dave has a talent and patience for laying out breadboards neatly. Pictured below are our six gate drive ciruits (two for each phase), a sweet MOSFET array (complete with repurposed heat sink), a voltage regulator and our brushless motor direct from Hobbyking (...China).

In that picture we are actually only using the motor as an inductor to see how we handle switching inductive loads. We used a function generator to test some stuff on it but to really test it we need hall effect sensors and an AVR with all sorts of fancy programmin'. 

Left on the list of stuff to do is still basically everything, but high priority items include: learning everything about the AVR atmega8, mounting hall effect sensors, making a motor test stand, learn to use KIcad, use KIcad to make schematics/pcb layout, make a control loop and stuff and make sure we meet out specs. Basically, there is a shit load to do. I am actually enjoying it a lot though and working on it is sort of addicting, I'll be pumped once we start spinning the motor. 

In other news Ian is coming tomorrow. YEAHHHHH BUDDDDYYY!