Recent content by crxguy52

For what it's worth, I looked for a while for a case that had decent cooling. I found that all the cool kids make their own extrusions, since they're making thousands of controllers. Not so well suited to us DIYers. The solution I came up with on my controller is a decent compromise, but the...

They say you lean the most from your failures… Started the day off by cleaning (sanding the oxide layer off) the heatsinks and applying the thermally-conductive-but-electrically-insulated pads. Old FETs were then desoldered and two of the final ones added. the first thing I did was check...

Made good progress on the mechanical stuff this week. Drilled and tapped he holes for the MOSFETs, voltage regulators, and added holes for the thermistors and bottom plate. Today I made the bottom plate that all the boards and heatsinks mount to. Aside from barely punching through the heatsinks...

I was reviewing the scope trace I posted yesterday, and noticed that the low side gate drive has a spike in it exactly when the high side turns on (red is high gate and yellow is low gate): So I adjusted the dead time to see if it was shoot through, or if it followed the high side gate. Turns...

Hooked up the rest of the connections from the logic board to the power stage today. I also added two of the 63V MOSFETs for testing. I hooked a very small motor up to it when everything was connected and... it ran! I kept a close eye on the gate to ground traces (connecting the high side probe...

Thanks for the input! I may order some SMD ferrite beads on my next Digikey order, there is a small enough gap between the gate wire landing pads and the gate pads to fit a small ferrite bead there. My initial idea was to use zeners to clamp any oscillations to 15V, but if that fails the beads...

Sunday I soldered in the buss bars, caps, and TVS diodes. One of the buss bars had to be trimmed to fit through my current sensor. If there is a rev 2, I'm definitely to do it how most other people do it and just use big copper bars bolted down to the PCB with some conductive paste. It might...

Spent most of the day assembling the logic board, and everything is populated. Next time I'm definitely using some better connectors, the pin headers were meant to be used between boards, not to have wires soldered to them. Both linear regulators seem to be doing their jobs correctly, and the...

The PCBs arrived today!One of the legs of my gate driver is shorted to another, but other than that it looks good. My only concern is that I left thermals on for my buss bars - so I'm going to try to push 400A through (5 holes * 4 thermals * width * 4 oz PCB thickness). Getting the buss bars out...

Thanks, I read through the thread. ZombieSS mentioned he used a TD350E with a boost stage. I'm curious what he meant - a gate drive driving two smaller FETs, which then drives the main FETs? I googled it and didn't come up with anything significant. I am concerned that I've got 1.4 amps to...

The only reason I can think that you'd need one is to maybe damp out some ringing. Otherwise you're adding capacitance, which is opposite of what you want. Less capacitance = faster switching time = lower losses Sent the PCB out today, should be in by the end of the month. I left a spot for...

I'll just leave these here... http://e0designs.com/products/hall-effect-sensor-adapter/ http://e0designs.com/products/hall-effect-sensor-board/

Routed all of the traces this week and mocked up the board (see below for pics). I ran Sparkfun's DRC and made some tweaks based on it, the only thing left to do is meander the traces for the gate drive to make them equal length. I'll hopefully get that done this week and send it off to get made...

A few specific questions I had were: 1. If I break out the trace from the gate output on the driver to the individual pins on the connector, I get a delta of about 4mm between the middle trace length and the end trace length. Is this enough to significantly affect MOSFET turn on\off time...

Hello all, I got started with an arduino uno about a year ago, and after a few projects I wanted to try something more challenging. I began designing a motor controller for a 48V, series wound golf cart, and it's turned out to be a bit more challenging than I thought. I've got most of the...