Title says it all. Our team wants a way to test multiple motors at once without using a RoboRio. Is there anyway to do this? Any help I’d appreciated.
What sort of motors? If it’s just brushed motors, then it’s pretty easy – get a few motor controllers that accept PWM and hook them up to something that can generate a PWM signal.
If you’re wanting a simple test rig for prototyping, we put an old (blue) PDB on a plywood board with several small cheap PWM speed drivers and old Talon FX motor controllers. From there we can drive any brushed motor by hand (CIM, Mini-CIM, 775, etc.) Use that with some of the Thrifty Bot 3D printed blocks, and HypeBlocks on some scrap 1x1 and you’re good to go for your first round of prototypes!
If you’re wanting to run something brushless, I’d recommend using REV’s PC tool to drive a Spark Max from over USB to run an Neo or a Neo 550. You can even set up on-controller PID this way. But same thing for power, use an old blue PDB if you have one. If you don’t have an old one, I’d probably buy a cheap blade fuse power block and use that instead.
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Note that basically all the brushless motor controllers are dual mode PWM/CAN, so you can run them from a servo PWM signal, you don’t need something that talks CAN.
Good point! I always forget they have that mode. Although, usually when I use brushless I care more about running at a certain RPM, etc.
There is a relatively recent similar question and good answers here on CD that you should search for.
For small cheap this is about as low as you can go - we bought these recently 3 for $9. Case is soft so printing a hard case may be advisable. There are other similar items, too. And more expensive and likely better ones in some way than these.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07TQSKLBK/
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Those are exactly the ones we use! The cases are a bit soft, but we only use them for prototyping so we don’t worry about it.
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