VXL and sensored motors?

[ElectricThunder]

Anybody try the VXL ESC and say a Novak or LRP motor? If so, how'd it work out?

[ElectricThunder]

So no one has tried this yet huh?

[porra]

It didn't work for me. I tired it with the HV6.5 motor and it actually fried it. Everything was connected the right way.

[SpEEdyBL]

How many cells? Don't think the HV6.5 should be able to run properly on the vxl. The motor is way too big for such a small controller.

[ElectricThunder]

It didn't work for me. I tired it with the HV6.5 motor and it actually fried it. Everything was connected the right way.

Considering the motor you tried (and I'm assuming you did this on 3s lipo; you're lutach over at RC-monster right?), it doesn't surprise me (like what speedy said).

I was curious as to how smaller motors (540 sized sensored motors) run, like say the 3.5R from Novak.

[chilledoutuk]

tbh I would think that the velineon should be able to power the hv maxx motors considering how crap the hvmaxx controllers are and that this velineon is spec'ed for 200amps.

[porra]

Yes, I'm lutach. I hate to say this, but I have to agree with chilledoutuk. Speedy, I first tried the HV6.5 with 7.4v and it didn't work at all. I then tried with 11.1v and it moved the truck a little bit before smoke came out of it. I forgot to mention it worked fine without the sensor plug connected.

[ElectricThunder]

Isn't the HV ESC rated at a much higher current rating (despite it's garbagey on resistance)?

So the sensor plug is FUBAR then lutach? So much for it being one kick ass sensored contorller...eh.

[SS Pede]

So much for it being one kick ass sensored contorller...eh.
I'm waiting to see results from a 540 sized motor. Maybe the VXL is not a true heavy-hitter, but it could be sweet for smaller applications. :)

[ElectricThunder]

I'm waiting to see results from a 540 sized motor. Maybe the VXL is not a true heavy-hitter, but it could be sweet for smaller applications. :)

True. I'm still reserving my final thoughts for when someone tests a 540 sized motor on it.

[GSMnow]

Just looking at the numbers, the Velinion ESC should have no trouble at all running the HV6.5 motor. And like he said, it ran it fine in sensorless mode. That sounds like the sensor plug was not setup correctly. Maybe the phases are in the wrong order? It does not make sense. It should be much tougher to make it run sensorless, as it needs to read the motor back EMF to commutate, where with a sensor plug that info is given to the ESC as clean pure square waves. 3S LiPo and a 200 amp rating should make the HV 6.5 motor run strong. That works out to 2000+ watts. Well over 2.5 HP. Now if the sensor plug is making it commutate at the wrong position, it could be like turning the end bell of a brush motor 90 degrees. It will sit still and SMOKE!!!! Sounds like a software update is needed. Did Novak make the HV and their 540 size motors use a different pin out? Or did Traxxas mess up?

[kufman]

weird, should be easier to make it work with the sensors. Doesn't that controller have an auto select for using or not using the sensors?

[NovakTwo]

All Novak sensor harnesses use the same wire sequence and pin-out.

[GSMnow]

Thanks NovakTwo. I expected that, but just wanted to make sure before blasting Traxxas. But now it seems official, they messed up the sensored software somehow. I know at least 2 people who were looking into the Traxxas Velinion specifically so they could run sensorless motors for bashing and put a Novak SS4300 in for a spec class race. I guess that won't happen just yet. I still want to try an SS4300 on my Mamba Max to see if it is at all useable or if it cogs to crap like some say. The higher turn motors should make enough back EMF to work okay, but the timing will probably have to be set for more advance and the start power turned up to get it going. I need to find someone willing to experiment with their motor before I plunk down the money for one ;-)

[kufman]

My novak 10.5 pro works ok on the mamba max. It does have random startup problems, but not all the time. I think the mamba will work better with the lower turn novak motors due to the gearing, that is, the lower turn motors will be geared with a higher ratio which will allow more revolutions of the motor before the slack in the drive train is used up. I tried another experiment where I put my feigao rotor in my ss5800 can and ran it on the mamba and it worked very well. I am guessing it is because the feigao rotor is larger in diameter, about 14.1mm. The smaller air gap must provide better back emf for the controller.

[Steve Weiss]

After we saw this thread we ran a few tests this afternoon and we wanted to report on what we found:

Using the Velineon ESC and an 6.5HV motor without the sensor harness yeilded less than satisfactory results.

With no load the motor appeared to run ok at first but once we put it on our flywheel dyno (a load) the motor cogged badly and ran at about half the RPM as it did with the sensor harness connected under the same load. This type of sensorless operation is hard on both the ESC and the motor and I wouldn't be surprised to see failues of one or more of the system components if it is run like this for sustainted periods.

When the 6.5HV was run in sensored mode it seemed to function without any major problems although we did have intermittant problems with the ESC turning on with the sensor harness plugged in.

[ElectricThunder]

Woohoo! My thread inspired a Novak test! WOOT WOOT!:D

Thanks for the info Steve. What about tests using your 540 sized motors?

[scoob]

I am interested to see if the sensored motors work well with the Veleneon ESC (with the sensor plug of course). I have a friend who bought a vxl and now wants to put the system in a T4 and race. He would like to run a nice sensored motor if possible.

Anyone who tries it please post results.

[SS Pede]

Hmmm. I could understand if the VXL didn't run sensored motors "perfectly," but it seems unlikely that it would be pretty much useless, as it appears to be with the HV 6.5. Not sure how Traxxas could produce an ESC that's supposed to run sensored motors but won't work with the most popular sensored motors out there (Novak). I am very interested in a 540 motor test...though the results on the HV 6.5 are not promising.

[GordonFreeman]

I've had first hand experience with at least 5 different brands of sensorless brushless EScs. They all can stutter to some extent at startup. I did run a Novak motor on a sensorless Mtroniks ESC and it worked fine once running, but it did stutter on start-up.

For high voltage high power set-ups, we are unfortunately stuck with sensorless. Although I thought I read on one of these threads that Novak has something up thier sleeve?

[Steve Weiss]

While we haven't done super-extensive testing with the VXL controller and ALL of our motors...the testing that we have done with the 6.5HV and the 10.5 pro motors seems that the controller doesn't like running them sensorlessly (IE without the sensor harness plugged in) ... once the sensor harness is plugged in performance seems to be ok... but we prefer the way that our ESC runs (faster low end response) with our motors.

As far as High Voltage applications are concerned we currently offer the HV Max ESC which actually performs quite strongly despite what some people in here have to say about it.

It will function on up to 16.8 V input ...which will handle 4 cell lipo voltage easily.

[SS Pede]

once the sensor harness is plugged in performance seems to be ok... but we prefer the way that our ESC runs (faster low end response) with our motors.

Well, there is some hope at least.

[ElectricThunder]

Well, there is some hope at least.

Hmmm. I'm still kinda up in the air about it. I can always run my sensored stuff on up to 4s lipo/14 cells on my HV ESC (but it IS a large ESC). Hmmmmm....decisions decisions.

So far, the VXL is "ok". I'm not impressed from what I've read regarding testing with sensored motors using the sensor plug... I think more tests need to be done though before any of us can say straight up that the VXL either passes or fails with sensored motors (using the sensor port; which is what I was getting at in the first place).:)

[SS Pede]

Yeah I'm not really looking for a new ESC, but it would be cool if the VXL did all that it claims...you know, future projects. :)

[crazyjr]

What about Fegaio motors? I know they use a different hookup, I'm pretty sure the plug is the same. If the Motors are made in china (like the rest of the truck), Matbe they used the fegaio wiring to set them up

[kufman]

With no load the motor appeared to run ok at first but once we put it on our flywheel dyno (a load) the motor cogged badly and ran at about half the RPM as it did with the sensor harness connected under the same load.

Loading a motor with a flywheel has never been a real nice thing to do. Doesn't really simulate the real world anyway.

[GSMnow]

Actually a flywheel is a very realistic load to simulate accelerating a vehicle. Wheel dynos for real cars have been done with load cells for a long time, and that works great for tuning an engine, but it does not take into account the lag caused by turbos, flywheel inertia, of other rotating masses. The "Dynojet" and others like it now use very heavy drums to simulate the inertia of the car moving along the road. Using this type of test shows that putting on 20 inch wheels accelerates slower, but they test identical on a load cell. I built my own flywheel dyno 15 yeas ago for brush type RC motors. I never did get it calibrated to tru power, but it was great for comparing motors. The program I wrote gave me a relative torque at every 0.2 seconds from a dead stop until it reached max rpm. The slower it accelerated, the more rpm resolution I would get as I just used the rpm difference over the time span to get rate of acceleration which = torque. This made setting timing very easy as you could see how it moved the torque curve. I would love to get it back together, but I need a flywheel that could handle the extreme rpm of modern brushless systems. I was using a cast aluminum flywheel geared to 1/5 the motor rpm. I spun it to over 6000 rpm (30,000 rpm at the motor) back then, but it was very scary. Running it over 10,000 rpm would surely result in an explosion. And it didn't provide enough load to slow the acceleration of really hot motors enough to get a good torque curve. My Mamba Max 5700 would rip it up so fast that even a dedicated microcontroller would have a hard time tracking the rate. So I need a flywheel that would provide a higher polar moment of inertia and handle greater rpms. I am thinking a flat plate of steel with no gear reduction. I still want it on it's own bearings though.

In any case, a pure inertial load of a flywheel should be easier to accelerate than a car with both inertial load and frictional drag.

[kufman]

In a car, you don't have 2 lbs of weight directly mounted on the motor. This is a big problem with motors that use bushings. It is also very dangerous to mount a flywheel directly to a motor, both for the operator and the motor. Using a gear reduction is a much better way of doing things. Even better, don't use a flywheel but a dynamic load consisting of a slave motor and a load. A feed back loop on the slave motor can be used to linearly increase the current in the DUT (device under test). This is the type of graph that you find on Lehner's, and Pletty's datasheets. This type of dyno actually helps find gearing and voltage requirements. It isn't often that a car is accelerating from 0 mph, especially in a touring car. It can also be used in airplanes and boats where a flywheel dyno is useless.

[GSMnow]

A flywheel dyno on an electric motor is never "useless" as you can see how much torque the motor makes at EVERY rpm point in one pass. True, for an airplane or boat application, the constant prop load holds the motor at a loaded rpm for a long time, and thermal effects may effect the results in flight. But I would still say a flywheel load dyno plot can still give you alot of information to help choose a motor or select a prop. For example, the flywheel dyno can show you at what rpm the motor made maximum power and maximum efficiency. Then you can select props to load the motor to that rpm range and see which provides the greatest thrust. Trying with just 10 props, on an unknown motor, you could be way off an never fine the ideal rpm range. The flywheel dyno plot tells you where you want to get the motor to run. Altering timing on a flywheel dyno can show you at what rpm the maximum efficiency, toruqe, and power is reached all in one rev up from stopped to max rpm. Change the timing and rev it up again, and see how it changed, all in just one rev up again. No other dyno can give so much data in just one pass.

I agree that a 2 lb flywheel mounted to nothing but the motor shaft could pose a serious threat to the motor and YOU! That is why I used a 3/8 inch drill rod shaft on ABEC5 bearings on both sides of the flywheel, and I held it to under 6000 rpm with a 5:1 gear ratio. For modern brushless motors, this is not good enough, so I have not resurected mine yet. My old setup used a PC to do all the data aquisition and timing so the resolution was limited, but it worked fine for 100 - 200 watt brush motors. For 1000 watt brushless systems, I figure it will need a greater load, a fast microcontroller to measure rpm in just one revolution (nanoseconds per revolution). My plan is to have an HC12 measure the rpm, time, amps, and volts and send it to the PC. I can then pull the data into EXCEL and calculate real torque, power, efficiency etc. and graph the data. For brushless systems it will measure the power into the ESC so the efficinecy will actually show all the losses for the whole power system. I may even have the HC12 produce the RX pulse to the ESC so it could even plot power and efficiency at any throttle position.

[trailranger]

GSMnow, when you built your dyno, did you use a load cell to calculate torque? I have seen some engine dynos, not car dynos that have the motor or slave motor mounted in a way the it will twist onto a load cell to give the torque. The horsepower was calculated from wattage on the slave motor.

[GSMnow]

My old one (over 15 years ago) was never calibrated to true torque, only relative torque for comparing motors and changes to motors. For the "torque" reading, I used the polor moment of inertia of the flywheel, which I measured by using the radius of the shaft wrapped with thread, hanging 2 pounds of weight on that thread and measuring the acceleration of the flywheel. I knew the torque going in, and I got a very limear acceleration, so it was pretty close to true torque. I know it was a bit optimistic, and my 8 bit A-D was too slow for the current and voltage readings which resulted in a few erroneous readings. I tested a Checkpoint DRAG motor (I think it was something like 6 turns) and I got over 250 watts out at just 25,000 rpm while putting only 340 watts in. I think the accelleration rate was so fast, that the current reading was behind due to sample rate etc. In any case, this motor was about the most powerful I ever ran and it scared the crap out of me when the flywheel hit over 6,000 rpm in just a second or so. The maximum sample rate for the rpm was just 18 per second, to I only got about 15 points from stopped to 30,000 rpm. Not enough resolution, limited my the 8 mhz lab PC of the time. I was not going to take my then new 386 into the garage. Besides, the internal timer tick I had to use in QBasic was still only 1/18 second no matter how fast the processor was. Using a dedicated microcontroller will have far more accurate results, and it will work on any PC, even a 4.77 mhz dinosaur.

Slave motor dynos have several issues. The slave motor working as a generator has an efficiency that is pretty poor, so it will detract from the true drive motor efficiency, and as it wears, the loss will change. Reding true RPM and using a load cell on a torque arm of the slave motor does get the true output power back accurate, but you still have to test at fixed amounts of load on the slave motor. Most setups I have seen offer 3 levels of load, you could make more to get a few more steps, but you will never get the complete power curve that the flywheel can give you. For electric motors, you can "curve fit" across your dots from the slave motor, but you are really guessing where the true top of the curves are, especially for efficiency. The only time I have seen a flywheel inertia dyno really fail to test an engine was with a drag racing turbo motor that had HUGE lag. It only posted 200 hp on the inertia dyno, but on a Clayton load cell, he hit over 400 hp. On the inertia setup (a dynojet) it never got over 8 psi of boost. On the Clayton, he held it at 5600 rpm and advanced the throttle and the turbo pumped it up to 18 psi after 1.5 seconds. On the drag strip, it proved to be a major pain to launch and without using nitrous, he never logged more than 10 psi on the strip. Wow, just like the inertia dyno. With a 50 shot of nitrous, it hit 15 psi in first gear, and got to 18 in 2nd 3rd and 4th. A few months later he ran it on the Dynojet again with the nitrous system and sure enough, it hit over 15 psi and showed about 350 hp. Much closer to the constant load Clayton setup. To me, this PROVES the inertia dyno was much closer to the real world. Any engines with less lag show much closer results. The inertia dyno usually shows less, and it is almost always due to the inertia of the flywheel and rims holding back the motor. And of course they really do that down the drag strip as well.

[kufman]

There is nothing to wear if you use a brushless slave motor and a 6-diode full wave bridge to make DC out of the 3-phase AC that comes out. The current feed back come from the battery wires on the brushless ESC, so you have to use the same ESC all the time to get consistant numbers. This also gives an overall system efficiency. If needed the 3-phase motor current could also be measured and converted to DC using a an Analog Devices chip that I have used in the past. Using a transistor bank for the load and regulated via the current feedback loop, gives a loading that can be shaped in any way needed. I personally would use my Eagle tree system to measure all the usefull data. 10 samples per second for 10 seconds of ramp up time would give a descent data set. True, this does not measure torque unless you have a calibrated slave motor. This is possible using a brushless slave motor since the motor parameters will not change with time. To get a descent power source, one could build a very basic switching power supply that uses a car battery for bulk power. Going from 12V down to 5V gives a little over a factor of 2 in current gain resulting in a maximum current of 500-600A for a few seconds. Or, you could go with the old stand by of 2 or 3 car packs hooked in parallel and a 5V linear regulator (Fantom Dyno).

Anyway, most of this is to make a dyno that doesn't cause problems for a sensorless system. In a real car setup, the drive train has enough slack to allow the controller to lock on and go. In a directly connected flywheel dyno, no such slack exists. Thus one of the reason's that Bob Novak listed as why they went with a sensored system. Not because it didn't work in a car, but because it didn't work on a flywheel dyno.

Enough for now, time for sleep.

Matt

[GSMnow]

I agree a slave motor (power absorber load) dyno can be built and calibrated to give very accurate results. With a true torque load cell and rpm pickup, the efficiency of the slave (load) does not even matter. And if you really want to optimise your motor setup for a steady rpm then this type of dyno could be better. For example, you KNOW you want the most power you can get at 25,000 rpm, you can program the load to hold at that speed and make adjustments until you get the greatest torque at that speed. You can also vary the load and make a plot of torque at multiple points to see a torque curve and all. But the flywheel inertia dyno is very hard to beat for a full dead stop to max rpm torque curve all in just one wind up.

[kufman]

I agree with the single wind up graph, it is very easy to get from the flywheel type dyno. The funny part is the people who seem to use dyno's the most is the oval guys. Their type of racing only accelerates from 0 once in the race(as long as you know how to drive :) ).

[GSMnow]

The flywheel dyno also shows alot of detail from 30,000 to 50,000 rpm, and I bet the oval guys care about that area.

[GordonFreeman]

GSMnow, nice work on the inertial dyno. I've thought about building one, but I don't really know enough about electronics/computer interface to do so. I once worked in QB like you and the input output was faily straight forward. But with todays MS windows, that has become much more difficult as I understand it.

I have an EagleTree Micro Recorder that I have thought about using, but it's data recording rate is only 10/sec (as I recall a tech at EagleTree said they might be able to "tweak it to record up to 20/sec). I also have a Basic Stamp thingie I got from Radio Shack that I've used to control servos/LEDs etc. Wondered if that could be used to record data? Oh, now I seem to recall you could only work with integers, which I found very distracting to the type of programming I was used to.

I think if you could record amps (input from battery for brushless), voltage (input from battery for brushless) and RPM, you can calculate all sorts of things, torque curve, power in, power out (from flywheel mass, etc.), overall system efficiency. Technically, I think, you only need to record the RPM (as it accelerates, F=ma, etc.) and know the inertial mass of the system to calculate the torque/power curves. It may not be absolute accuracy like you mentioned, but should be very repeatable for motor/battery comparison.

I always wanted to do an inertial dyno just exactly for the reason that it is much closer to real world acceleration. This is assuming, of course, that you get the gearing/weight correct for similar motor acceleration (a few seconds from 0 to full speed). The system I was thinking of would allow spur, pinion and flywheel mass changes to match the motors RPM and power range.

[GSMnow]

I am just learning the FreeScale HC12 microcontroller. I have used the HC11 quite a bit and the new one is assembly code compatible but is much faster and has more instructions. They do only work in integers natively, but that is fine as long as you scale the resolution that you need. On the HC11, it is an 8 bit core, but it has several 16 bit functions including MULT and DIV. The HC12 is 16 bit but will run the 8 bit code. Timing on the older slower HC11 is accurate to 2us. If you used one pulse per revolution at 50,000 rpm, it would have an accuracy of 1 in 600 or 0.16% rpm accuracy. To give you an idea, it would count from 49,918 to 50,000 then to 50,083 etc. At 25,000 rpm, the same timer rate would be good for 0.08% steps as it will count to 1200 (2us ticks) per revolution. The HC12 timer can be run at higher rates for even more accuracy, and we can alwyas count 2, 3, 4, or more revolutions to get more accuracy, but while accelerating, each count should become less and less. Take the times of each of 4 revolutions in a row. Use the totla time for an accurate avergae rpm for this sample. Use the average of the difference between the 1st and 2nd, 2nd and 3rd, and 3rd and 4th revolutions to get a very stable acceleration rate. With enough ram on the microcontroller, we could in theory store every revolution for incredible resolution. At low speeds it could use a single turn with enough counts, and at higher speeds it could then use 2 4 or even 8 revolutions to keep the count over 1,000 ticks for 0.01% rpm accuracy. The data would just be sent at 9600 bps over serial. I use an older pc running Win 98 just for projects like this. QB45 works just fine with an old school serial port.

[GordonFreeman]

I was wondering if you could have more "teeth" on the flywheel to get more data during slow speeds, but I suppose that reduces the accuracy at high speeds? (never mind, I need to learn to read closer.)

What do you do? Set up the RPM sensor as an interupt? (I'm just on the edge of not knowing what I'm talking about :D)

[kufman]

But with todays MS windows, that has become much more difficult as I understand it.


Even doing simple things like using the serial port has become much more complicated, especially with WinXP.

I was also thinking of building a dyno/dicharger/charger, but I was going to do it using an FPGA. Still have to think about this some more.

[GSMnow]

On the HC11 chip I know well....
It has an 8 channel timer system. It uses and internal hardware clack that you can choose a few different rates for. 4 of the pins are "input capture" which will freez the count of the internal counter on the selected edge of the IC (input capture) pin. The counter is 16 bit with 2us as the fastest increment rate. Slowest speed without an overflow would be one inout pulse per 0.13 seconds, or less than 8 revolutions per second with a single pulse per revolution. That is 480 rpm which is probably low enough for our use. The top speed it could take (with 1% resolution, 100 counts) is about 300,000 rpm. For 0.1% (1000 counts) you are down to 30,000 rpm. The input capture pins set a dedicated interrupt that you can turn on or off in software. Each pin has it's own vector so it can service the interrupt very quickly.

There is also a pulse accumulater which counts the edges on the input pin. You could use these together to make certain you counted only one input capture and didn't miss servicing it.

The HC11 internal D to A converter system is a single 8 bit converter with an 8 channel mux. With a few little tricks I have gotten 10 bit accuracy out of it with oversampling and filtering in software. Multiple inouts can be used with external scaling to expand the accuracy as well. With 10 bits though you can measure 10 volts with .1% accuracy (0.01 volt steps from 0 to 10.23) The current is tougher with just 0.1 amp steps from 0 to 102.3 amps.

The HC12 chips can be had with many more faster timer channels and a better A to D system with up to 12 bits native. The core clock on the HC11 is just 2 Mhz vs well over 20 Mhz on the HC12's. We really don't need that much processing power, but it sure will service the interrupts faster.

Check out this site
http://www.technologicalarts.ca/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=50_36&products_id=234

Just $45 for alot of power.

Tech Arts also still has HC11 products, but for the money, I am reading up on the 9S12 chips and trying to learn the new features. For just a little more money they have more advanced chips that have dual timer systems and dual A to D systems with greater resolutions, etc. Look at the Adapt12 series.

[trailranger]

What about basic/pic controllers? 16MHZ, 20MHZ

some have servo controllers so if you wanted to test an esc motor combo with a push of a button you could.

http://robotstore.com/store/default.asp?catid=1583&page=2

[NovakTwo]

Anybody try the VXL ESC and say a Novak or LRP motor? If so, how'd it work out?

So, how are they working out?

You know, running a sensored motor on a Velineon esc?

[ElectricThunder]

So, how are they working out?

You know, running a sensored motor on a Velineon esc?

I dunno. I'm trying to find out myself; no one has given me an answer to what I'm trying to find out (how 540 BL sensored motors run on the VXLs).

[GSMnow]

What about basic/pic controllers? 16MHZ, 20MHZ

some have servo controllers so if you wanted to test an esc motor combo with a push of a button you could.

http://robotstore.com/store/default.asp?catid=1583&page=2

The BASIC Stamp interpreter language is actually quite slow. They need to run at 20 Mhz to get anything done. Especially since they don't have hardware periferals. All the the timing and even the A-D is done in software. Many clock ticks are needed to do the job. The HC11 running at just 2Mhz can be monitoring 8 A-D channels and a 2us accurate 8 channel timer system and just be sitting in a loop waiting for the interrupts from the dedicated hardware. The serial port is even a smart subsystem where as the lower end PIC's have to clock out each bit with code.

I am not saying a PIC (Basic stamp) can't do the job, but the program would be much more complex, and using the stamp interpretter to make the programming easier is probably going to be too slow to keep up with the acceleration rate. I have read up on the PIC architecture a bit, and the whole model of getting things done is much more complex internally. The HC11 assembly code is actually quite easy to use and the true hardware periferals do most of the dirty work for you. Set a couple registers, and you just get an interrupt when your data is ready. I built a 24 channel data logger for auto racing on just a 2Mhz HC11. It read 4 wheel speeds, engine rpm, injector pulse width, Trans input and output rpms and 16 analog inputs at 26 samples per second. That was limited by the 9600 bit per second serial link to the PC. The HC11 has higher bit rates, but they are not standard rates available on a PC. We were developing our own higher data rate storage unit, but it never got finished when Competition Data Systems undercut our target price. The prototype could get up to 100 samples per second with CPU time still available.

The new 9S12 chips look amazing, and I really want to do a project with one. That is the best way I have found to learn how to program a chip. This might just be the project for it. The 9S12 has all of the HC11 periferals and more, and run s a16 bit core at well over 20 mhz. No PIC can touch it. They even have versions with USB 2.0 and/or ethernet ports built in as well and some have all the hardware to talk with virtually any flash card CF, Memory stick, SD, etc.

[kufman]

Here is the CPLD that I am currently using at work.

http://www.altera.com/products/devices/cpld/max2/mx2-index.jsp

They are easier for me to understand since my education is in electronics and not programming.

So, how are they working out?

You know, running a sensored motor on a Velineon esc?

I have run the 10.5 pro on two of my sensorless controllers and it runs fairly well. The Mamba has good, yet sometimes unpredictable startup, and the Schulze has predictable startup with an occasional stutter.

[GSMnow]

I don't have alot of experience with CPLD's. I did get an FPGA training system, but I am still stuck in the learning curve. In my office we have guys who build complete systems with FPGA's and they can be incredibly powerful for repetitive tasks. We use them for high rate motion JPEG2000 decoding. But we still end up with a Xeon processor to handle the file system, user interface, and then it feeds the data to the FPGA's.

[crazyjr]

Hasd anyone tryed the fegaio SENSORED motors, I think the sensor port is possibly setup for the fegaio's over the Novaks

[SS Pede]

I have heard a report of Novak motors (SS5800 maybe? I forget which one) running fine on the VXL, in either sensorless or sensored mode. No details given but that is at least one report of success. :)