I decided to make my very own, very simple, shunt resistor breakout board. It connects between the battery and Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) or other motor driver.
A header is included to measure voltage across the battery and voltage drop across the resistor either with a DMM or a microcontroller.
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| DMM test clips attached |
I quickly drew up the design in Eagle, used toner transfer method and etched the board, soldered everything together and voila, simple current measurement.
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| Pretty simple circuit board, eh? |
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| 0.001 ohm, 1%, 3W = 50A+ (WSR31L000FEA) |
The resistor is 0.001 ohms so 1mV = 1A (it's a Dale-Vishay WSR31L000FEA). My DMM has precision to 0.1mV, thus 100mA here. I selected a resistor with sufficient power handling to measure over 50A continuously.
So what the heck am I going to do with this thing?
- Measure RC airplane propeller load on motor
- Calculate battery internal resistance
- Plot relationship between motor current and compass distortion
- Calculate remaining battery capacity on an autonomous robot
- Overcurrent protection
- Create a digital ammeter with an MCU and LCD display
Some add-on hardware is needed to interface with a microcontroller. The AttoPilot shunt boards use a Texas Instruments INA-169 for amplifying voltage drop across the shunt to a suitable range for an analog to digital converter. (While I am using the simpler board above for bench testing, I decided to get the AttoPilot board for use on Data Bus)
One has to be careful, of course, that the shunt presents substantially less resistance than the load. Some motors have very low resistance windings. For those cases, a hall effect sensor like the Honeywell CSLA2CD seems like it would do the trick.
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| AttoPilot current/voltage sense board |
You are using DC Motor for speed control, and i think you are using PWM for it, so are you measuring Pulsating DC with Shunt Resistor??
ReplyDeleteWell, I used a digital multimeter (DMM) for measuring current. Because of the limited bandwidth of the DMM, and the high PWM frequency of the ESC (electronic speed controller), the measured value was, more-or-less, the DC component of the current.
ReplyDeleteFor the experiment I conducted, I was mostly concerned with magnetic effects, so mis-reporting of voltage wasn't too big of a deal.
To be more accurate, I'd look at the waveform on an oscilloscope and sample with ADC at a suitable speed and do appropriate processing to get a more accurate current estimate.