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Motee: The motor controller. Reinvented.

Motee is a smart motor controller focused on you. Everything's onboard!

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Motor controllers are important part of every robotic enthusiast’s life. Altough these ones avalaible on the market nowadays are quite useful, they usually need additional space on the robot’s platform. It makes them uncomfortable in use. We decided to change it, to make it easier for the maker.

The very basic way to define Motee is to say that it is a motor controller based on H bridge. Building a robot and writing a code is much easier with Motee. It is small, universal, comfortable in use and cheap - just perfect for your robot.

Take a look at main key features of Motee:
* Motee is only 11,5x18mm,
* Motee can be soldered directly to a motor,
* Motee need only two pins of a microcontroller,
* Motee is designed to connect modules in series,
* Motee has a dedicated library for AVR, Arduino and Raspberry Pi,
* Motee is cheap, it costs only $9 or even less while buying a set.

Specification:

- I2C controlled H-bridge module

- Maximum current : 1A

- Operating voltage: 2,75 - 6,8V

- Dedicated for motor with 7mm pins dimension

- Weight <1g

  • 1 × DRV8830 Power Management ICs / Motion, Motor and Servo Control
  • 1 × CR0402-J/-000GLF Resistors (Fixed) / Zero Ohm Jumpers
  • 2 × M20-9990445 Connectors and Accessories / Board-to-Board and Card Edge Connectors
  • 2 × CRG0402F1K0 Resistors (Fixed) / Thick Film Surface Mount
  • 1 × MC0603B104K500CT Capacitors / Ceramic

  • Project progress

    Peter Wasilewski11/30/2016 at 22:34 0 comments

    Hi!

    Wow It’s been a while since last update apparently we've forgotten about Hackaday, but not about motee ;) A lot happened during this time and I’d like to tell you about it. I think I’ll divide it into a few logs so it’ll be easier to read.

    CHANGES

    We’ve done two or three prototypes, but they are a lot different from the ones from last log. They have a built in microcontroller, encoder and communicate through rs485. These are the main differences from the first version. It sometimes had problems with i2c communication due to electromagnetic interference from the motor, so out priority was to change the way of “talking” to the module. Besides, the motor is fully integrated into the case, so users don’t have to worry about breaking something. The case itself has two or four mounting holes, so it’s much easier to adapt.

    SOFTWARE CHALLENGE

    Our software goal is to make mote compatible with Arduino. Latest PCB has a microusb connector, and we managed to run a special bootloader for STM32 ( thanks to STM32Duino), so now we are able to program Motee in Arduino environment without any external programmers. We believe that will make Motee much more attractive.

    RS 485 COMMUNICATION

    The communication is based on an evaluation board like Arduino or RPI being a master, and motors connected in parallel. Another option is to make one of the motors the master and others the slaves. That’s the biggest advantage of built in microcontroller – we don’t have to use other boards as masters to control the motors.

    LAST PROTOTYPE

    As I mentioned earlier it is ( in contrast to previous models ) based on STM32 microcontroller. We decided to choose one of ST’s family because it has a hardware encoder support, higher clock frequency, and many more peripherals. Below you can see a full list of main components :

    -STM32f103 microcontroller

    -Rs485 controller

    -Hall effect encoder

    -H bridge

    -Two LDO regulators

    - USB connector and universal 4 pin output connector

    For now the pcb has many bugs, and that’s our work for next weeks. Make a nice pcb and fix all the issues we had to deal with this version.

    Below you are able to see some photos from the prototyping process ;)

    STM32 prototype

    AVR prototypes :

    Peter.

  • New version is coming

    kamil07/21/2015 at 23:00 0 comments

    New features:

    - smaller ( 13,75x10,75mm)

    - smarter (you can connect more than one to single motor, providing more power)

    - cheaper (expected price is $7)

    Now we are working on prototype.

View all 2 project logs

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