Motor Control

Motors

Brushless DC motors are the leading choice for RC cars, planes, drones, etc. because they have a high power-to-weight and size ratio. This vehicle uses two front-wheel drive 5,050 Kv motors produced by TrackStar. The car turns by turning one motor faster than the other.

ESC

Brushless DC motors are driven by three phases of sine wave that the Raspberry Pi cannot supply from its GPIO pins, so an Electronic Speed Controller (ESC) creates them. The ESC draws power directly from the battery, and is controlled by a PWM signal generated by the Raspberry Pi. The PWM signal is generated using a hardware PWM library in the pigpio library. See the Motor class written in Python.