New Speed Controller Announced

[Qbranch]

When they announced the '09 controller, I didn't mind letting somebody else fiddle with it.

But these motor controllers... if they do everything they say they do well, they should be a knock out. I've been working with/around CANbus for about three years now and it's always been very stable and VERY robust (you can, afterall, short the bus completely out and nothing will smoke).

They have this unit at the NI Week convention in texas. I asked my remote observation unit (aka my dad) to go take a look at this new speed controller and see what he could find... it ended up he handed the phone to the guy from luminary so, just two minutes after I first read about it here, here I was talking to the guy who makes em! Funny ol' world, isn't it.

Anyhow, they don't have all the specs nailed down yet, but so far they do know the speed controllers take an input of up to FOUR MEGAHERTZ (meaning, if you put a 1024 count encoder on a CIM motor's shaft, it could run at it's free speed and the processor wouldn't bat an eyelash) on the quadrature encoder input.

Also, the chop rate on the drive's output is 16KHz so no more angry buzzing first robots, now we'll have a nice whine that's way up at the top of we human's audible range (could be annoying, but probably will be barely detectable. 32-bit resolution over the duty cycle range from full on to full off, linear accross the entire range with 1-bit resolution (meaning minimum throttle is 0.00000002% instead of 10%).

Oh how I wish we had these speed controllers this year! Our autonomous would have been SO much smoother!

-q