Servo - January 2009

BLDC

HARDWARE

PART 2

by Fred Eady

Manually rotating the shaft of my Anaheim Automation BLY171S-24V-4000 BLDC motor with my fingers isn't making it. So, I've scrounged up and assembled some electronic components that I intend to use to force the BLDC motor shaft to rotate in lieu of my motor-shaft-driving fingers.

If you take a look at the specifications for the BLY17 series of brushless DC motors, you'll see that every motor in the family has differing characteristics. With that, it will be useless for me to whip up a one-of-a-kind solution for the motor that is currently sitting on my bench.

What if your BLDC motor application requires a bit more torque than my example project can offer? What if you don't want to use a PIC microcontroller as the motor controller? I've rattled off only a couple of outside-of-the-box possibilities and I'm sure there are many more we could expose. Rather than approach the rest of this project with a goal of manipulating only the ‘4000, we will assemble a microcontroller-based BLDC motor driver using motor control building blocks that can be scaled and applied to other BLDC motor driver designs, as well as the ‘4000. Now that you're privy to the plan, let's get started.