I am seeing a motor controller that will permit joystick control of a pair of hoverboard motors. The motors are 3-phase brushless with Hall sensors, at 24v at 250 watts each. I’ve seen very cheap, $18 ones (1 motor each) on Amazon. But, anytime you reverse direction, without first stopping, they are fried. So, I also want one that can tolerate the joystick requesting a reversal of the motors. The motor controller would perhaps need to know how to wait until the motor indicates they are stopped, before trying to back-drive them. Another request is an electric braking system (by dumping power to a resistor) that is proportional to the joystick position compared to the speed.
I imagine all these features could be created by using a microcontroller that does the work and then controls the cheap motor controllers. But, microcontrollers can certainly have issues, especially when you are writing the code. I don’t want to destroy motor controllers every time I create a bug in the code. I’ve used the Sabertooth controller before, but can’t spend that kind of money now. Is there anything in the sub-$50 range. What is the on-ramp cost to get these features?
The Robotshop page on motor controllers can’t be filtered in more than a few ways, so the only practical way to find a motor controller is to just ask.