This evaluation board consists of 3 high power half-bridges that can output up to 5A peak, or 4A continuous (depending on heatsink). It has been designed with a large copper ground plane on the bottom that functions as a heatsink. If the driver IC heatsinking requirements can not be met by the copper layer alone, the bottom of the board could be fastened to an external heatsink. There is circuitry on board to amplify the winding current, and for sensing the back EMF voltage to assist in commutation.

Note that this driver will not work standalone, and requires a microcontroller to output 3 PWM signals in the proper sequence, in order to make the motor run.

Brushless DC (BLDC) Motor Driver PCBs are avalable as well, but they are difficult to assemble by hand without the proper soldering equipment.

Features

• 3 half bridge drive channels
• 4A continuous, 5A peak output current (depending on attached heat sink)
• Input voltage range (limited by the input capacitor voltage): 7-14 VDC (standard) using 100uF 16V capacitors, or 7-33 VDC for the high voltage option with 68uF 35V input capacitors
• Back EMF sense, and reference resistor dividers
• Very low ESR capacitors are used on the power supply rail to handle the high ripple current that is to be expected when driving a high current motor
• Winding current sense resistor, with amplifier to boost the output signal
• Optional current recirculating diodes to increase efficiency (installed by default)
• ESD protection on all microcontroller I/Os
• Driver die has good thermal coupling to PCB copper layers
• 0.200" screw terminal block (installed by default), or optional 0.156" Molex headers for high current connections
• Test points for most signals of interest

Purpose

I designed this board because I couldn't find an evaluation board for this driver IC, and I wanted to experiment with a BLDC motor. At the time, I was working on a POV LED display, and thought a BLDC motor might be a good solution for spinning the prop. Alas, the POV display project was never completed, but this is a useful board regardless.

Additional Resources

A good example of how to drive a board like this using an Arduino can be found at: BerryJam.