Week 9

Goal

This week is the first week I have a final project idea that I’m excited to work towards. A key part of this project will be 2 motors. Motors are not something I have a ton of experience with yet, so this is the week to learn how to make something with motors. In particular, I decided to learn about Brushless DC Motors (BLDCs) using the QWinOut A2212 1000KV Brushless Outrunner Motor 13T and the A4949 Three Phase Sensorless Sinusoidal Fan Driver from the inventory.

Board design

The boards I had in hand so far were:

  • qpad-xiao from Week 3
  • qpad21 from Week 3
  • AVRXXDUXX_eval_board from Weeks 5 and 6
  • mini_qpad from Week 8

I could’ve made a board with just the A4949 and plugged it into one of the board above. But after burning most of Week 8 on connectors, I had lost my appetite for hacking connections together - especially with higher voltages at play. So, I made a new board. To try something new, I used the SP32S3 XIAO this time around.

For the schematic, I worked off of the 4949 application note. I added VREF to one of the ADC pins just to monitor if needed. My design is shown below:

Final Schematic

Figure 1

I did not want to do anything fancy with connectors this time. My layout is shown below:

Final Layout

Figure 2