Just was hoping if anybody can shed some light on what the diffirence between a micro-controller and a motor controller is?
A quick summary for
A quick summary for ya:
Microcontroller
• Programmable
• Low power, can’t drive much more than LEDs and small components directly
• Acts as the 'brains’
Motor Controller
• Usually not programmable
• Has enough power to drive motors
• Doesn’t do much thinking, just provides the electrical muscle to get your motors going
In a typical hobby robot you’ll have one microcontroller, and one or more motor controllers, depending on how many motors you have. An important note is that servos have a built-in motor controller, so you can control them directly with the micro.
So if you are funning any
So if you are running any servos or motors of any kind do you have to have a motor controller in addition to a micro controller?
Per wikipedia…
Microcontroller: A microcontroller (sometimes abbreviated µC, uC or MCU) is a small computer on a single integrated circuit containing a processor core, memory, and programmable input/output peripherals.
Per me…
Motor controller: Allows you to power motors that have higher power demands than your MCU can provide. Usually something like a pair of H-bridges which would allow you bidirectional control of two motors.
edit - eh, seems I’m sloooow pulling up links. Everyone beat me to it lol
No, you can run a servo
No, you can run a servo without a motor controller because they have a motor controller built in. The MCU sends a signal to the servos motor controller and the servo is powered by an external power supply (although some project boards can even power a servo). Also, you can run a DC motor without any motor controller at all if you only need an on and off motor with no speed control.
Which makes sense because
Which makes sense because the motor controller is really to control speed. Like a VFD(variable freq. drive) for a 3 phase 480VAC industrial motor. I know they are quite diff. but basically the same concept. Its all bout getting enough amps to the motor and controlling speed. Would this be correct?
That’s about right. Some
That’s about right. Some motor controllers just use digital inputs, some run on serial bus comms, just like industrial VFDs/VSDs.
Both systems use switching transistors to control the power being fed to the motor in order to vary the speed/torque, although instead of hefty IGBTs a common motor driver IC just uses little MOSFETs.
The main difference I guess is that for DC motor drivers you often don’t have any integrated current or speed feedback - you’ll need to add those seperately. Unlike a 3 phase motor you can’t directly correlate the driver output frequency with the speed of a DC motor either, so open-loop speed control is pretty much impossible.