Close
0%
0%

SOLO, A Motor Controller for All Motors

SOLO is a Motor Controller designed to easily run most types of electrical motors, DC, BLDC, PMSM and ACIM. it's easy to use and versatile.

Similar projects worth following
SOLO is a Motor Controller designed to easily run most types of electrical motors including DC brushed, Brushless DC, Permanent magnet synchronous motors and AC induction motors. SOLO’s specifications are unique and designed for the next generation of users to deliver maximum efficiency in terms of quality, cost, and effort invested in all the projects dealing with motors. SOLO is aiming to be useful for beginners to experts, by featuring numerous ways for interaction and communication with it, which makes it easy to use and compatible with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, ..

Visit us: https://www.solomotorcontrollers.com/
order a unit: https://www.solomotorcontrollers.com/shop/

It’s been almost 16 years ago when I’ve made my first Robot, A simple line-follower one. Since then, I was constantly dealing almost every time with Motors and their issues personally within the teams I was working alongside, Observing how crucial they are, and how it can get frustrating for non-technical and technical people to get their hands on them. I’ve witnessed how we spent hundreds of hours in different projects to deal with motors and I wish we could have had something that could speed us up so that we could focus on what really mattered in our projects, the real goals and results ( obviously running motors was not the final goal :) ).

That’s how we came up with the idea of SOLO in 2016 as a team in POLIFACTORYwhich is a FABLAB in Milan Italy. We are determined to eliminate the need for people to spend a vast amount of their time in prototyping and projects on Motors, helping them to speed up their product design with the minimum effort possible and giving them the chance to experiment and make mistakes and go on! Now after 4 years of constant work and 5 prototypes made, we have decided to share our results with the community with the hope to bring our project on a new level .

In SOLO we are aiming to make things as much as possible Simple and Automatic, that’s why we put a huge amount of time into hiding the complexity of the design inside and leaving the simplicity outside for our users. SOLO in the simplest form can be commanded with a single analog voltages signal as a Potentiometer or a single ARDUINO/RASPBERRY PI using a PWM enabled Pin without anything else, to tune the Speed or even the Torque of your motors. If you want to manage in a more advanced and complete way you can interact with it using USB, UART or CAN protocols. SOLO supports sensor-less and sensor-based controls for both Speed and Torque of the motors, it also provides position control using Encoders. 
By design, SOLO has the aim to make running motors possible for everyone, from a total beginner to an expert, each could get what they want.
The main features of SOLO are listed in Below:
  • Wide input voltage supply range (from 8V to 58V)
  • The continuous output current of 32A, Max Current of 100A
  • Capable of controlling DC, BLDC, PMSM and ACIM motors
  • Dual Core with parallel processing architecture
  • Extremely fast FOC loop-rate up to 140kHz (7µs complete execution time)
  • Over-current, Over-voltage, Over-Temperature, Under-voltage and Reverse Polarity Protection
  • Selectable output PWM switching frequency (from 8kHz to 80kHz)
  • Automatic self-tuning and identification of Motor parameters
  • Open-loop or Closed-loop Control modes
  • Speed, Torque or Position control
  • Advanced Sensor-less and Sensor-based Control
  • Advance Field Oriented Control
  • PWM and Analogue voltage input for Controlling Speed and Torque
  • USB, UART, and CAN Bus (ISO 11898) Communication enabled
  • SVPWM modulation
  • Encoder and Hall Sensor Input with +5V supply
  • +5V/1A (5W) output to supply external modules
  • Updatable Firmware
  • Heatsink mounted on the back of the board to enhance the thermal behavior
  • 2000µF onboard BUS capacitance

As stated above one of the strongest points of using SOLO is its ability in controlling motors in Sensor-less mode, which makes you able to control the speed or torque of your motors without having Encoders or Hall sensors. Below is an example, you can see how is the quality of speed control in sensorless mode on a 150W Brushless DC motor with a sudden change of direction from clockwise to counter-clockwise and vice versa.

Another feature of SOLO is using advanced Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation known as SVPWM for Brushless motors which results in a much more efficient switching and subsequently smoother behavior in control over 3-phase motors. In below you can see the recorded line-line voltage of the phases of a 200W Brushless DC motor using SVPWM in SOLO:

Another thing about SOLO, we mounted heatsink on the back of it, which will result...

Read more »

Adobe Portable Document Format - 3.66 MB - 09/11/2021 at 13:15

Preview
Download

Adobe Portable Document Format - 1.44 MB - 09/11/2021 at 13:15

Preview
Download

Adobe Portable Document Format - 1.25 MB - 09/11/2021 at 13:15

Preview
Download

SOLO_3D_Model.zip

3D step file of SOLO

x-zip-compressed - 1.13 MB - 08/25/2020 at 13:23

Download

View all 39 project logs

View all 5 instructions

Enjoy this project?

Share

Discussions

paulvdh wrote 11/17/2023 at 18:16 point

Your graph with the startup and the 3 phase voltages looks very weird to me. Can you explain why the phase shifts between the three lines are not symmetrical?

  Are you sure? yes | no

Reginald Sourn wrote 06/25/2020 at 07:08 point

Really amazing design !!!

  Are you sure? yes | no

milad wrote 06/25/2020 at 12:08 point

Thank you alpha, we'll do our best to help even a little bit to people who are dealing with electrical motors, hopefully we can meet their needs.

  Are you sure? yes | no

royvanlierop92 wrote 06/03/2020 at 17:48 point

Do you have a schematic I can browse? Would be interesting to see what pre-driver and MOSFETs are used.

  Are you sure? yes | no

milad wrote 05/23/2020 at 12:53 point

Thank you Benjamin, Yeah, they are powerful ! we'd be glad and appreciative if you participate in our BETA program : https://solomotorcontrollers.com/product/solo-beta/

  Are you sure? yes | no

Benjamin Prescher wrote 05/22/2020 at 19:08 point

I love these C2000 controller! PCB looks nice and clean. Keep on going!

  Are you sure? yes | no

Similar Projects

Does this project spark your interest?

Become a member to follow this project and never miss any updates