Motor controller programming

The motor controller was carefully powered up for the first time using a laboratory power supply. Only the power cables and the serial cable was attached to the controller to program it. About 20Vdc was given to the controller and it drew less than 100mA current when turned on.

A RS-232 cable was provided with the controller. Luckily my laptop has a serial port which is getting rare on newer laptops. The laptop used for the programming runs Windows XP so there should be no problems.

I installed the programming software that is available from Kelly Controls web page. Then after powering up the controller and having the serial cable connected between the PC and controller the Kelly Controls software found the motor controller by itself!

The programming software was easy to use and the available options were quite well explained. Most of the default setting were accepted at this time but some were altered. I am preparing for the second test drive where I would use 6 small lead acid batteries is series. For these weak batteries I wanted to set the battery current limit to as low as possible (80A). I also adjusted the throttle voltage range to be 1.2V to 3.8V after testing the throttle pedal output with a multimeter. With 5V power supply the hall throttle signal range was measured very closely from 1V to 4V so I will start with about 0,2V margin on both ends.

Finally I altered the regenerative braking settings a little. I would like to have the "release throttle regenerative braking" feature enabled, but this braking mode was not as well explained as the other two available braking modes. The second test drive will show if I had understood the braking parameters correctly or not.