Driverino

(italian noun) /ˈdraɪvərnəʊ/ : little driver

Driverino is a pretty simple, low power, driver for BLDC sensored motors. The project target was to create a very small unit capable of driving a motor rated about 50-100W. The board is fitted with ATmega32U4 micro the same of Arduino Micro Pro commercial boards, once the correct bootloader has been burned-in the board should act as an Arduino board (at least for programming/debugging task) and also spin a motor. The project includes:

1. Fully designed 2 layers PCB board (KiCAD);
2. Driverino firmware sources;
3. MCT8316Z library sources.

Driverino's firmware allow users to drive BLDC motors using a standard RS232 interface trough simple interactive commands. The firmware allows also:

• closed loop speed control (implementing a PID loop);
• motor/driver status monitoring;
• R/C ESC emulation.

The library allows Arduino users to interact with BLDC motors without knowledge of MCT8316Z chip and SPI protocol.

Driverino features

• ATmega32U4 microcontroller;
• Micro USB interface;
• MCT8316Z motor driver;
• 41x26mm (size);
• RS232 interface;
• Standard R/C input compatibile.

The board can drive up to 24V-36V 8A rated sensored BLDC motors and provide 5V power supply (200mA max) mimicking R/C ESC BEC feature. Driverino supports a variety of different types of Hall's sensors (analog single ended, analog differtial, digital) and also different sensors supply rates (3.3V and 5V). To correctly fit for a specific sensor kind some soldering may be required: by default the board project is fitted for digital 5V sensors.

Firmware

TBD

Library

TBD

TODO:

• Add features:
  • vm measurement;
  • current measurement (via INA250).
• Optimize PCB layout.
• Write Library.
• Write Firmware.
• Submit to Kitspace
• Submit to Made-With-KiCAD

Links

• Atmel/Microchip ATMega32U4
• TI MCT8316Z
• Arduino
• KiCAD

Live long and prosper!

That's all folks.

By[t]e{s} Weirdgyn