Using ODrive with 3S Li-Ion battery (minimum supply voltage limit)

1

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anybody has tried using the ODrive with a 3S Li-Ion battery pack?
Is there any risk of damage or malfunction operating the ODrive below 12V?

The official documentation says the power supply voltage should be between 12V and 24V (or 48V depending on the version). But the usable voltage range on a 3S battery would be from 12.6 V to 9V.

After having a quick look in the datasheet, the mosfet driver seems to be the limiting factor for low voltage operation. According to the datasheet, the DRV8301 can operate down to 6V. Is there something else that limits the supply voltage on the lower end?

I am aware that the performance of motors will degrade with lower supply voltage, but I think this should be fine for my application as I only need small torque in combination with very low speeds.

Cheers,
Daniel

2

Hi Daniel,

The ODrive will error out if the DC voltage goes under 8V even for an instant. So keeping it a bit above that, say 10V, is recommended.

3

Thanks for the information! I will give it a try then.

Cheers,
Daniel

4

Have you had any problems? I’m wanting to run 3S with 20A peak current on each motor, from a 3000mAh Turnigy nano-tech battery which is rated for 25C continuous/50C peak. I know those numbers are usually inflated from what you should actually expect, but since I should be topping out at about half the continuous rate, hopefully it won’t sag below 8V unless it’s about out of juice anyway.

5

I’m successfully using on a daily basis both a 3300mAh 3S 25C lipo as well as a 1300mAh 3S 75C lipo without any issues. My application uses 2 Odrives with max current of 10A for each motor, so 40A total, although this is rarely reached. 10A in total is common though.

Once the 1300mAh one was running really low, slightly below 10V, but the Odrive was still fully responsive.