Project Owners: @Ethan Abraham

Project Description

Ever since the 2023 AEAC competition, WARG has established a 12S power architecture for the drone. We currently use the following 12S APD COTS ESCs on the drone: https://www.getfpv.com/apd-120f3-x-12s-50v-120a-esc.html. This board is very expensive and often goes out of stock.

The goal of this custom 12S ESC is to replace the COTS ESC in the system architecture and produce them in volume so that we have a healthy supply and a low cost/ESC. Therefore, this board must be very reliable.

Requirements

• Power

  • Can take up to 12S voltage (max ~55V)

  • Can handle at least 60A continuous current

• Firmware & Control Algorithm

  • Primary plan is to use the open source AM32 ESC firmware library (https://am32.ca/) that is widely used. It contains a sinusoidal motor control algorithm along with support for DSHOT input and telemetry output

  • Backup plan is to use the STM32 Motor Control Workbench 5.4.8 to use their FOC (Field-Oriented Contol) firmware library (X-CUBE-MCSDK - STMicroelectronics)

    • For some reason the older version (5.4.8) let’s you design with a custom PCB but the newer versions do not

  • Therefore, this board is being designed to be compatible with both.

Board Subsystems

• MCU Pinout & Requirements (MCU Pinout & Requirements): Pins sorted by function

• Firmware Settings (Firmware Settings): Gate driver SPI, AM32 plan & configuiration

• Three Phase Inverter (Three Phase Inverter): MOSFET calculations

• Power and Converters (Power and Converters): LV Power Architecture