Programming ESC with Arduino

The story: I hit a break wall with ODrive. ODrive is an open source brushless DC motor (BLDC) driver built with robotics in mind (my application..). I don’t have faith in the project and after months of trying to make it fit my application I’m abandoning it. It’s painful to spend that kind of money on a product (two even!) … but I’m not hopping back on the Stepper bandwagon just yet. I’ll see if I can put my brushless DC motors to use on PopBot 0.5.

First step was deciding on if I could use an off the shelf ESC or buy one. I purchased a RC “rockcrawler” driver as I assumed the firmware would be most compatible with my application. The car and boat ESCs have forward and reverse speed by splitting the PWM servo input in half. While waiting on shipping I found an ESC for a boat and a few for quads in one robot junk bins. Quads are single directions but the boat one was good enough for testing. It had no torque in the low end but that’s not a surprise based on the application with the motor type. I needed a way to program this ESC without a controller and receiver. Programming is typically performed w/ the receiver/controller by pushing the speed to min-max in a certain order. Well that can be done with the arduino of course. Here is a super simple piece of code for you if you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. This will also allow you to control your ESC once it’s programmed and you can uncomment my basic acceleration code if desired.

Hook up the ESC control signals (servo input). On the ESC the white (signal in, sometimes I think the alternate color is orange?) to digital output 9 on the Arduino Uno or Mega. Tie the black (or brown) wire to one of the grounds. DO NOT HOOK UP RED. We don’t need the power from the ESC.. it’s usually not something we want anyways (like 6V… ).

You’ll need this library. Download it and place the uncompressed directory in your Arduino libraries directory.

https://github.com/maxpowel/ESC

/*
 * Charles Ihler, iradan.com
 * 2020-04-27 build from example of library. 
 * 
 * Open the serial monitor... enter 0 (and enter) for reverse
 * 1 for foward and 2 for idle/stop.. 
 * Most ESCs want a motor hooked up or warn of damage.. make sure the motor is safe and can't spin off and hurt something. 
 * 
 */

#include <Servo.h>
#include "ESC.h"



ESC esc(ESC::MODE_FORWARD_BACKWARD);


int sel = 0;
String ssel;

void setup() 
{
  Serial.begin(115200);  
  pinMode(LED_BUILTIN, OUTPUT);
  esc.attach(9); //change to some other PWM pin if required

} 

void output_high() {
   digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, HIGH);
   esc.setDirection(ESC::FORWARD);
   esc.setSpeed(500);   //comment this out and uncomment below for acceleration. When test running motor.
   //for (int i = 0; i <= 150; i++) {
   //   esc.setSpeed(i);
   //delay(25);
   //}
}
void output_low() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);
  esc.setDirection(ESC::BACKWARD);
  esc.setSpeed(500);   //comment this out and uncomment below for acceleration. When test running motor.
  //  for (int i = 0; i <= 150; i++) {
  //    esc.setSpeed(i);
  //  delay(25);
  //}
}
void output_n() {
  digitalWrite(LED_BUILTIN, LOW);
  esc.setDirection(ESC::BACKWARD);
  esc.setSpeed(0);
}
void loop() 
{
    Serial.print("Forward (1), Reverse (0), Stop/N(2)?(1/0/2): "); 
    while (Serial.available() == 0) {}  
    ssel = Serial.readString();  
    Serial.print(" --> ");
    Serial.println(ssel);
    sel = ssel.toInt();
    if (sel == 1) {
      output_high();
      Serial.println("ON!");
    }
    if (sel == 0) {
      output_low();
      Serial.println("OFF.");
    }
    if (sel == 2) {
      output_n();
      Serial.println("Neutral");
    }
  delay(100);

} 
The setup project with motor removed.

Enjoy…

ESP32 Boot Camp

… for me.

I got a rando e-mail offering me “free parts” and I usually don’t even bother opening the e-mail. It’s ALWAYS garbage right? Well, maybe I hadn’t slept well the night before but I opened it. (psss. You can scroll down about a page before I actually get anywhere in this post…)

What was I thinking? I hovered carefully over the link… seemed pretty safe… short-ish domain ended with a .com .. not extra stuff on the end… OK. They got me. The website was http://digitspace.com — It seemed like an electronics website so I e-mailed. Back…. going back and forth they seem to be running some kind of promotion or perhaps they are trying to build some brand recognition getting bloggers to give them some advertising. In the end selected $50 worth of parts that consisted of two ESP32 micro dev boards that had WiFi (of course), LoRa, OLED display and and extra LED. There was some switch button types but they were a bit more and for some reason I didn’t think I needed them. Well a week later these things actually showed up (and I didn’t have to give them my credit card or paypal info!).

OK THE START..

A week later the boards showed up in the mail.. they look and feel reasonable and they came with some sample firmware that proved they worked. Unfortunately the site did not include any documentation… but I did the “hardwork” for you if you want to follow along… but let’s start with the end… So far I am here:

First thing first I had to add ESP32 support to my Arduino IDE.. I dropped this in the “additional board manager URLs”:

https://dl.espressif.com/dl/package_esp32_index.json

See how in this quick video..

I found a simple tx-rx LoRa code off the internet but I won’t share because it took too much re-work to get working on my board. So I took it’s essience …

I had to add these libraries:

Add libraries:
Adafruit SSD1306 by Adafruit
Adafruit GFX Library by Adafruit
LoRa by Sandeep Mistry

(all came right off the normal library manager)

I couldn’t find an OLED library that worked until reading some and found I liked this one that seemed to be the “best for me”:
https://github.com/osresearch/esp32-ttgo

After that it was smooth sailing. My code is work-in-progress towards my final project. It can be found here: https://github.com/chasihler/TTGO-OLED-RX-TX-HTTP-PUT

Inspiration along the way:

Battery Monitoring: https://github.com/YogoGit/TTGO-LORA32-V1.0

A nice post, read too late, had the correct pinout/board of many different but similar boards: http://brettbeeson.com.au/ttgo-lora-esp32-v2-1-r1-6/

Putting your ESP32 to sleep:
https://randomnerdtutorials.com/esp32-deep-sleep-arduino-ide-wake-up-sources/

My findings were similar … though I haven’t ACCURATELY measured it my USB analyzer says 50mA on and 10mA off.. no peak readings yet but I can live with 10mA in my project.