An Affordable Controller for Your Robot’s Brushless Hub Motors
The NearZero board offers two-channel control of brushless motors for fine positioning applications with up to 3A per motor.
Nobody has ever really been able to agree about what makes a robot a robot, but we can safely say that it needs to move — that’s kind of a robot’s whole deal. There are many ways to make a robot move; you can use pneumatic actuators, hydraulics, or even something more exotic like muscle wire. But, of course, the most common way to move a robot is with electric motors. Even those have many subcategories, but brushless hub motors are especially useful. Thanks to the Sky’s Edge NearZero controller, you now have an affordable way to use those motors in your next robot project.
Sky’s Edge is a robotics company that was started by Justine Haupt. She also built the fantastic rotary cellphone that we recently featured on Hackster News. After Haupt started Sky’s Edge, she immediately noticed that there weren’t any economical solutions on the market for controlling brushless hub motors. So Haupt did what any good engineer would do, and designed the NearZero controller. It’s built specifically with brushless hub motors in mind, but can also work with other kinds of actuators. There are, however, much less expensive options if you want to use stepper motors or regular old DC motors that don’t require positioning control.
The NearZero controller is compact enough to integrate into most projects, and offers two-channel control of brushless motors. It can handle up to 3A per motor, which is plenty for the vast majority of robots. Those can be anything from 7V to 36V. Most importantly, it can provide fine positioning of those brushless motors — even at low speeds. That means you can use brushless hub motors in many applications that would normally require stepper motors or the use of encoders. With brushless hub motors and the NearZero controller, you can actuate your robot directly without the need for complex gears. The controller can accept PWM input signals, as well as those from ROS (Robot Operating System). A single NearZero controller, without any motors, currently costs $105.