Quote:
Originally Posted by TeacherWeeks
I was wondering if anyone had devised a good way of testing motor controllers? If so I'd love to know your method, my team has a couple of controllers that are questionable and we need to test them.
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You can build your own test rig. All you need is an old unwanted junker laptop and a couple of motors. (And a battery).
Take the laptop and install FreeDOS on it.
Write a simple app to toggle the RTS pin on the serial port to simulate the desired servo signal (you can code it to simulate both Vic and Jag signals). You can get highly accurate and stable performance because there's no multitasking going on. You can hard-code a test sequence into the app, or you can read the test sequence from a text-file script, or you can have a simple user interface to change the command.
Build a fixture to hold 2 motors with their output shafts connected together. Drive one motor with the motor controller you are testing. Run tests with the leads of the other motor open. Stop the test and connect the leads together and run another test with the leads shorted.