I'm starting a new project

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1

Hi guys, my 6 dof racesimulator is now finished and I’m starting a new project. It has something to do with BLDC motors because I love them now. But the ODrive is not what I’m searching for in this case. Do you guys know any other drivers that have a reverse function?

This is what I found so far:

  1. esc with extra wire to reverse the direction

  2. vesc

But: I don’t want to use an extra wire and I think the vesc has to much power. I need 60A.

I you have any suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!

PS: I will still be available on the forum to help you guys out.

Cheers

Carelsbergh Stijn

1 Like
2

What is the use case exactly?

3

I’m making a robot for a competition and I want to use brushless motors for the main motors.

Cheers

4

What do you mean when you say a reverse function?

I guess I am a little confused because you can easily turn the motors both ways with the odrive.

wayneStock

5

Hi

I don’t know what odrive limitation you encountered that made you observed it couldn’t do reverse. For position control I do forward and reverse myself. For current and speed control, I don’t know.

I happily used a vesc before on hall effect gear bldc motors in speed control application for modest autonomous robot (not competition though). With a pair of them (therefore with two vescs), I transported over 230kg for hours and hours. It’s really solid. I control them through uart. It works in forward (positive speed command) and reverse (negative speed command). I have seen two teams using VESC for robot race competition (and winning the race with it! I even saw their car also going in reverse direction because their AI vision algorithm had detected an obstacle at last moment)

In fact, the reason why I used vesc is because I couldn’t get odrive hall effect sensors to work. In between the documentation got better and some people published configuration scripts that should make things easier now.
VESC configuration wizard (vesc_tool) is really super user friendly. On the downside, I find vesc community not as vibrant (and their forum software sucks too)

I have used some cheap ESC (from hobbykind, yep and another manufacturer I forgot the name), in current control applications controlled through pwm too. But back then I only need forward and brake (no reverse). I’m pretty sure I have seen a friend of mine using same cheap ESC with pwm on forward/reverse on a race RC car.

6

Hi guys

Maybe I didn’t explain myself good enough, ODrive would be perfect, but I don’t need al the functions, so why would I pay for al the things I don’t use. So I was looking for a bidirectional ESC. And by now I’ve found a solution.

Thanks

Cheers

Carelsbergh Stijn