Arduino UNO R3 as flight control plus brushless motor driver

Question

I am trying to build an RC plane using an arduino UNO as the flight control board.

I found a code on the arduino forum for driving a 3 phase AC motor with an arduino. http://forum.arduino.cc/index.php?topic=8642.0

I believe it will also work for brushless motors commonly used in RC airplanes.This will eliminate the need for an ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) which are pretty expensive.

Now I plan to use a single arduino board to communicate with the nrf2l01 rf receiver , control the servos as well as drive the brushless motor(mentioned above).

In each cycle of the code the arduino will be fetching data from the receiver,sending a pwm signal to the servos and setting which two phases of the brushless motor will be high and which one will be low. Since so many things are being done in each cycle the phase change of the brushless motor might not be fast enough and this might hamper the motor speed? Or is the arduino fast enough to handle all this and it won't affect the speed noticeably.

Answer 1

Since so many things are being done in each cycle the phase change of the brushless motor might not be fast enough and this might hamper the motor speed? Or is the arduino fast enough to handle all this and it won't affect the speed noticeably.

This is very much an engineering question. How would one go about answering this?

One method is do a worst-case execution time measurement. Another method is to use control theory and estimate the minimum control frequency for the system (or sub-systems).

Let us assume (for this argument) that the required update frequency is 50 Hz (20 ms cycle time). That gives approx. 320.000 instructions (AVR @ 16 Hz) per control cycle.

The algorithm sketch above in your question is basically dominated by the time to receive the message. This depends on a number of factors; PLL start up, write message from AVR to NRF, transmission frequency, coding, etc, but also message loss and retransmission/acknowledgement. With 2Mbps and 5 byte address, 32 byte payload, and 2 byte checksum the transmission time is at least 300-400 us plus approx 100-200 us for the AVR/SPI to NRF communication. A total of 400-600 us which is well under the 20 ms.

What other design considerations are there? Motor interference on the communication, antenna design, range, protocol design, etc.

Cheers!