In Part 1 we introduced our Arduino based ESC and followed this in Part 2 with an explanation of the power stage and MOSFET drivers. Part 3 focusses on the bootstrap capacitor which is part of the driver circuit used to turn the high-side MOSFET hard on. #arduino #bldcmotor #esc #bootstrapcapacitor #IR2110
https://reefwing.medium.com/an-arduino-nano-electronic-speed-controller-esc-part-3-e17392bd2887
We have been prototyping an Arduino based Electronic Speed Controller and planned to include a 0.96″ OLED display. Tests on an Arduino UNO, clocked at 16 MHz, have shown that this display could best be described as sluggish! Even using SPI, printing out 3 lines of text results in a loop cycle time of 15 Hz. Quelle horreur! This prompted us to investigate further to understand the bottlenecks, SPI vs I2C speed, and whether there were any work arounds. #arduino #oled #SSD1306 #DFR0650 #SPIvsI2C
https://reefwing.medium.com/oled-displays-are-slow-2f422840d735
Part 2 focuses on the power stage (AKA 3-phase bridge) and why MOSFET drivers are needed.
This series of articles was sponsored by PCBWay. #arduino #shield #ESC #bldcmotor #pcbway
https://medium.com/@reefwing/an-arduino-nano-electronic-speed-controller-esc-part-2-2bb5ec7c309a
Having delved into how BLDC motors operate and provided an overview of trapezoidal sensorless control, we can bring it all together in the design of an Arduino ESC shield. This turned out to be much harder than we expected – now we know why no-one does it!
This series of articles was sponsored by PCBWay.
#arduino #shield #ESC #bldcmotor
https://reefwing.medium.com/an-arduino-nano-electronic-speed-controller-esc-part-1-4f65076fb2e4
As part of creating the new Sumobot motor controller PCB I had to create a custom part which wasn’t already in the EasyEDA library. The part is a momentary switch from Jaycar. The process is pretty straight forward, design the schematic symbol, design the PCB footprint and then link the two. Should you ever need to do it – here is how! https://reefwing.medium.com/creating-a-custom-easyeda-part-c02abdd85653
Controlling brushless DC (BLDC) motors is a lot harder than brushed, particularly if they don’t include a sensor for rotor position. This is why Electronic Speed Controllers (ESC’s) exist. In Part 11 of our series we demistify BLDC motors and their control.
https://reefwing.medium.com/how-to-write-your-own-flight-controller-software-part-11-dee7feef05f2
I just came across an interesting API that your app can use to predict a persons age based on their first name. The API is free for up to 1000 names/day. It is called agify.io (https://agify.io/). #development
You can try it out in your browser – just insert your first name instead of “david”:
https://api.agify.io?name=david
BirdNET-Pi: Using AI to identify Birds from their Songs.
Wouldn’t it be fantastic to be able to identify birds from their song? Well it turns out that you can.
BirdWeather
BirdWeather is a great citizen scientist initiative that uses volunteer stations to continuously listen for bird songs all over the world. The stations use machine learning to analyse these sounds and identify birds based on their song. BirdWeather is a living library of bird vocalizations. It also provides an indication of bird visit frequency and populations around a station, apart from those which keep quiet! You can play back the recorded songs and bird detections are shown in real time on the web site.
The artificial neural network used to analyse the recorded sound and extract and identify bird songs is called BirdNET.
BirdNET
BirdNET is a joint research project between The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the Chemnitz University of Technology that is “focused on the detection and classification of avian sounds using machine learning … [with the aim to] assist experts and citizen scientist in their work of monitoring and protecting our birds”.
Detection Stations
There are currently only 12 stations in Australia (including me), all based on the Raspberry Pi single board computer. You can learn how to configure your own station in our latest article on Medium – BirdNET-Pi: Using AI to identify Birds from their Songs.
In Part 9 of our series on “How to write your own Flight Control Software”, we describe how to control the ESC and brushless motors to get the desired drone orientation. #arduino #drone #nexgencodecamp
https://reefwing.medium.com/how-to-write-your-own-flight-controller-software-part-9-c87fffb426eb
We have a solar system and I wanted to keep an eye on our relative energy consumption and generation during the day. The SolarEdge inverter that we use has a mobile app and a web dashboard but neither refresh automatically. This article explains how I set up the Seeed reTerminal as a dedicated web kiosk to be able to monitor our solar performance in near real time. #solar #raspberrypi #webkiosk