POLOLU SIMPLE HIGH-POWER MOTOR CONTROLLER 18v25 HEATSINK

Thought someone might find this interesting.

I have been working on motor speed control project for my fishing kayak’s trolling motor. I am now on my 3rd version and using am using the Pololu Simple High-Power Motor Controller 18v25. This controller is great and allows me to programmatically control just about anything related to my trolling motor speed.

I know from the forums that Pololu talks about heat sinking this controller but leaves that up to the end users.

Pololu states there is an upper limit of 25 amps for this controller. This is ideal and in any real world application in order to obtain the 25 amp limit of the controller, there needs to be some sort of heatsink. I am guessing many folks using this controller will have it mounted inside some sort of box, which in my case is aluminum. Having the controller in an enclosed environment only makes the heating issue problematic.

I have designed and built a heatsink for this controller and I was actually surprised how well it works. My design will be mounted to my aluminum enclosure so heat will flow from the controller to the aluminum box. If necessary, I can add additional surface area to this box by adding some sort of finned heatsink to the outside of the box.

Now that I have tested my heatsink design I will be having a friend of my fabricate a production prototype out of a single piece of aluminum. He has a CNC setup.

You might want to check out some images I posted on Flickr regarding this project.
POLOLU SIMPLE HIGH-POWER MOTOR CONTROLLER 18v25 HEATSINK

My test results are here
HEATSINKTESTRESULTS001.xlsx.pdf (38.6 KB)

My smc.settings.txt file is her
smc_settings.txt (3.0 KB)

Phil