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Connecting the hardware

Connecting the Arduino SimpleFOCShield to the microcontroller, BLDC motor, power-supply and the sensors is very straight forward.

Microcontroller

  • Arduino SimpleFOCShield is designed to be easily stackable on all the devices featuring arduino headers, such as: Arudino UNO, Arudino MEGA, Stm32 Nucleo and similar.
  • Bit it can also be used as a standalone BLDC driver as shown in combination with Stm32 Bluepill.

BLDC motor

  • Motor phases a, b and c are connected directly the motor terminal connector TB_M1

BEWARE: Power limitations

Arduino SimpleFOCShield is designed for gimbal motors with internal resistance higher than R>10Ohm. The absolute maximal current of this board is 5A. Please make sure when using this board in your projects that the BLDC motor used does comply with these limits.
If you still want to use this driver with the BLDC motors with very low resistance R < 1Ohm make sure to limit the voltage set to the board.
For a bit more information about the choice of motors visit BLDC motor docs

Power supply

  • Power supply cables are connected directly to the terminal TB_PWR
  • Recommended power supply voltage is from 12V to 24V but in general, the board has not been tested for higher voltages, but there shouldn’t be too much problems up to 30V.

Encoder

  • Channels A and B are connected to the encoder connector P_ENC, terminals A and B.
  • If your encoder has index signal you can connect it to the encoder connector as well, terminal I.

Magnetic sensor SPI

  • Magnetic sensor’s SPI interface signals SCK, MISO and MOSI are connected to the Arduino’s SPI pins (Arduino UNO 13,12 and 11).
    • If the application requires more than one sensor all of them are connected to the same pins of the Arduino.
  • The chip select pin is connected to the desired pin. Each sensor connected to the same Arduino has to have unique chip select pin.

Magnetic sensor I2C

  • Magnetic sensor’s I2C interface signals SCL and SDA are connected to the Arduino’s I2C pins (Arduino UNO A4 and A5).
    • If the application requires more than one sensor all of them are connected to the same pins of the Arduino.
  • It is possible that you will need to use additional pull-up resistors for the SDA and SCL lines.

Magnetic sensor Analog output

  • Magnetic sensor’s Analog output is connected directly to any analog input pin, on a figure below we use A0
    • If the application requires more than one sensor each of them is connected to one of the analog input pins.

Hall sensors

  • Channels A, B and C ( U, V and W ) are connected to the encoder connector P_ENC.