[Grbl_Esp32 Issue#712] DC Encoder Motors – No Hardware Discussion!

Hey all,
I am working on implementing DC encoder motor drivers directly. I am creating a new issue separate from the previous ones because it derailed into discussion on different motor/encoder options. No hardware discussion is allowed here!

I am from the MaslowCNC project and have gone ahead and made a board with 5 dc motor drivers. If anyone is interested in the details, the design can be found at InvncibiltyCloak/ESPMaslowController. There are different kinematics on this machine, but that is simple to implement in the relevant machine file, so we can ignore this for now.

The TLDR here is I have 5 encoders connected directly to the ESP32 and 5 DC motor drivers connected through an SPI-connected PWM generator. At this time, I am only trying for 3 axis control.

The ESP32 has a Pulse Counter peripheral which is capable of doing quadrature decoding and counting to 16-bits. With some interrupts it can be extended to any size at minimal CPU load. This is how the encoders are counted.

I have been looking through the source for how best to handle closing the loop on the DC motors. It looks like stepperpulsefunc is where all of the action happens.

I plan to use Motor.step() to allow my custom DCMotor class to count the generated step/direction pulses and PID based off that. Is there a more direct way to get the total step count?

Next, the PID requires a consistent timing for good performance. The main stepperpulsefunc gets called at varying timing depending on various factors, and in general is called far too often. At this point I plan to use TimerG0, Timer 1 with a different alarm value to drive the PID updates.

Any comments or suggestions on the plan? Thanks for the help!