In the fall 2019 semester, I took 6.111 (digital logic design). Jackson Gray and I built a brushless motor controller as a final project for the class. The switching logic for the controller was running on a Digilent Cmod A7 FPGA module, and for maximum power, we used a 2004 Prius inverter. The Prius inverter has the advantage that it is designed to several hundred volts of input power, a few hundred amps of output current, and costs about $100 from a scrapyard. It's an impressively powerful inverter for impressively cheap, and it's nearly impossible to accidentally blow up, making it a great piece of test hardware for large motors.
Based on some older work by Bayley Wang on reverse engineering the prius inverter here, Jackson and I were able to control the inverter and get current sensor feedback.
A copy of our final report is here.
We used a Hyundai Sonata hybrid alternator motor as a test motor. This motor is an IPM capable of outputting roughly 20 kW, so it's a good motor for testing a brushless motor controller. It has a relatively high winding inductance, so it works reasonably well with a low switching frequency. A paper for 6.640 where I analyze the motor's electrical properties is here.
