Hi there,

First post here and entirely new.

I just wished to contribute something. For my honours project for my degree, I made a desktop CNC machine.

Part of this project was to produce a simple spindle. To drive it I used a brushless motor, a small thing.

As you know, to control a brushless motor speed you need a servo tester. The trouble is, when you switch a brushless ESC on, you need to wait about 7/8 seconds with the servo tester at full off while the ESC initialises before turning up to the required speed.

Well, I designed my own speed controller using a simple PIC micro controller and program. It's designed as such so that it powers off the ESC's own servo supply. When power is applied to the ESC, the controller starts off at zero ignoring the speed dial for 8 seconds while the ESC initialises. Afterwards, the controller reads the dial and spins up the motor.

It makes the whole thing automatic and requires no manual intervention. Simply a delay from the control software on the host computer to accommodate for the ESC initialisation.

I'm curious whether there's any interest in this sort of thing as more brushless spindles come about? I've not seen anything like it before.