Electronic hardware for controlling a vehicle mounted movie production crane
Copyright (c) 2019-2022 Martin Schröder, All rights reserved.
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This repository contains electical schematic and pcb layouts for boards that can be used to control a movie production camera crane.
What does such a crane look like in practice? Well here is CraneControl boards providing HMI and dual motor control function to FlyingBergman movie production crane (click on images to watch the video):
FlyingBergman crane is best known for being used for filming all car scenes in 2022 Netflix series "Clark".
If you are a movie producer and would like to order finished product then send an email to info@swedishembedded.com and ask for more information. The complete FlyingBergman setup also includes the crane assembly, HMI control panel for mounting inside the vehicle and all necessary electronics.
FlyingBergman is only one specific application of crane control hardware design. CraneControl was originally designed to be a versatile solution capable of advanced features like field oriented control of 2 60V PMSM motors at the same time using the same microcontroller. It was also designed to provide modern communication options like CAN-FD and EtherCAT.
In the case of FlyingBergman only a subset of these features was used - meaning there is a lot of room to epand the use of this hardware for achieving more complex control tasks in an industrial environment.
This repository is for you if:
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You are a student of embedded systems courses at swedishembedded.com (https://swedishembedded.com/tag/training).
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You are building industrial control solutions and you would like to add support for advanced motor control (in this case you can also contract this task to Swedish Embedded Consulting Group. Book a call here: https://swedishembedded.com/book-call)
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You are simply curious about designing practical hardware and would like to learn from this project.
You may use this design as inspiration for other designs as long as you develop schematic and layout by yourself. You may also use this design as learning materials for study.
If you would like to build a commercial product using this design then you can contract Swedish Embedded Consulting Group to implement a specialized hardware/software solution for you (send and email to info@swedishembedded.com).
To generate gerbers for this design from command line you can use kibot (https://github.com/INTI-CMNB/KiBot) with provided 'motordriver-2x.kibot.yaml' file in this repository.
You can also edit this design in KiCad (version 6.0 or above).