Strostkovy
Titanium
- Joined
- Oct 29, 2017
I would like to make an electric log splitter for my dad for Christmas. I'm choosing electric due to it only seeing occasional use and always being in range of an outlet. However, I don't like how they tend to be either slow or weak, so I am using a variable displacement pump. All components will be surplus where possible, and I can get an affordable pump that has manual displacement control. I will be using a pressure sensor and an actuator on the pump.
All of this will be controlled by a microcontroller, with an adjustment setting to keep the amps down to what is available. My concern is oscillation in the control loop. I can make a PID control loop, but tuning sounds terrible. What I'm thinking is that I can have aggressive settings for P and D to get the displacement to decrease quickly under load (I'd like no more than 115% peak load) and limit the slew rate of the actuator when increasing the displacement.
Does this seem like a sane approach to the control loop?
Mechanically the machine is quite simple to build.
All of this will be controlled by a microcontroller, with an adjustment setting to keep the amps down to what is available. My concern is oscillation in the control loop. I can make a PID control loop, but tuning sounds terrible. What I'm thinking is that I can have aggressive settings for P and D to get the displacement to decrease quickly under load (I'd like no more than 115% peak load) and limit the slew rate of the actuator when increasing the displacement.
Does this seem like a sane approach to the control loop?
Mechanically the machine is quite simple to build.