Blog
Project details, notes and such
A digital twin of the bench, and what it found in the FOC drive
A phase-domain model of motor 3, the L6230 bridge and the F302 board, running the unchanged firmware. Calibrating it against the bench found a misplaced hall sensor, a position-dependent torque behind low-speed hunting, and three flaws in an online R/ψ estimator, and each fix went back into the drive.
October 6, 2026Six-step at 120° and 180° conduction
A bench comparison of the two six-step conduction patterns on a sinusoidal motor. 180° gives 15% more voltage but drew up to 3.7× the phase current and tripped the overcurrent limit at half the speed 120° reached. The harmonic current follows a simple ψ/(n²L) rule.
October 2, 2026Six-step, a second board, and position on halls
Sensorless six-step commutation from first forced steps to a live handover from FOC, a port to a second MCU and motor, and a first position loop running on hall sensors — with its limits measured.
August 2, 2026Going open, and letting AI take the Wheel
The Modular Motor Controller is now open source. Notes on the repository, a back-EMF sensing experiment that didn't work as intended, and the milestone reorder that came out of it.
July 20, 2026A second motor changes the story
The auto-tune profiler was built around one bench motor. Handing it a completely different one broke exactly the assumptions worth breaking — and the probe found the first motor had been hiding a trick.
July 13, 2026What's actually on the chip
A breakdown of the MMC firmware at milestone MS6 — feature set, drive modes, and where every kilobyte of flash and RAM actually goes.
July 12, 2026How this started
The origin of the Modular Motor Controller project — asking Claude to build an FOC motor controller from scratch.