[dwalsh62]

Very nice! Keep up the good work.
However if I may suggest... You should start with driving the BLDC first. If you will make a DC drive only it's gonna be a little obsolete as BLDC's are way more reliable and nowadays more and more are available.
And if you will have a working BLDC driver transforming it to both BLDC and DC would require only a few modifications in code, all the hardware required to drive the DC motor are already there...

Best of luck!

Mihai

I already said this is not a post asking for features yet you found it necessary to tell me I should be making a BLDC driver first and then use it as a brushed driver by making changes to the software and this is never going to happen.

This will not be a "One Driver Fits All" and brushed DC motors are plentiful, I can find very few BLDC servo motors that are inexpensive.

The drivers will be dedicated drivers, one for brushed, one for brushless, supporting 12V to 48V motors and up to 10A continuous, simple to install/setup so even a nut-less monkey can do it.

It is not as simple as you say, most BLDC drivers have 3 or more phases and additional inputs for HALL sensors and in my opinion a poor hardware design if you need hall sensors.

Yesterday I was playing with a BLDC servo drive, the schematic, board and firmware I got off a post from this site, fixed the schematic, tossed his single layer board design and made a smaller two layer design capable of supporting 15A continous, I made changes to swap out the 74LS14 for some single SOT23-5 SMD hex inverters and the DIP40 ATMega644A to a TQFP44 ATMega1284P-AU cause I have it on hand, then made a small trip the the ER when the motor just about took my wrist off during a low power run test. and the design has no inputs for hall sensors which leads me to believe that hall sensors are not required if the firmware is correct.

Now I need to find someone who's good at AVR programming to add support for the encoder index signal and then there will be three inexpensive designs that people can obtain/build.

For around $250.00 + $35.00 shipping you can buy a leadshine ACS606+BLM57180 motor which they claim has a quadrature 1000PPR (4000PPR) encoder but the encoder only has A and B signals and isn't running as quadrature and uses hall sensors for coil phase sensing, the specs are not correct for power and torque, typical china "put what they think makes it sound powerful" specifications are never accurate so don't expect anything serious when my customer tested these they fell so short at half the specified ratings making them no better than a Nema23 stepper motor.

It's dsPIC based and using the wrong fets in the driver stage, a quick change to NDP6060L and the driver starts to come to life, you can't fix the flaws in the firmware because they don't provide the source and they set the fuse bits to prevent you from reading the code out of the dsPIC so it's really not a good buy.

My customer finally has a factory making him an OEM motor and driver package for almost half the leadshine price ($130.00), the unfinished sample was impressive at 1.94Nm of torque, STM32F103 based driver, motor has no hall sensors, tamagawa (copy) quadrature encoder running in quad mode and a basket-wound stator with a cast rotor which really resembles a hybrid AC/DC 3-PH motor more than a BLDC motor due to the lack of magnets.