In this video tutorial, we will control a pair of brushless motors from a Raspberry PI computer. We will use one of the computer's USB ports to connect a network of brushless motor controllers. We will power the computer, the controllers, and the brushless motors using a single battery, similar to a autonomous vehicle design.

The first motor is an outrunner type, a kind of what you would use for a vehicle propulsion. The bigger motor comes with a quadrature encoder which means it can be used as a powerful servo.

I made a cable to power my set up. On one end, the cable has a socket for plugging the battery. The cable splits into a two parallel parts to power the controllers, and the Raspberry PI. The bottom part of the cable further splits to power a pair of brushless motor controllers.
By the way, the controllers need 7 to 60 Volts DC. I put proper connectors at the ends of the cable, so that I could just plug it into the controllers.

Servosila brushless motor controllers come in rectangular or circular form factors. The controllers have USB and CANbus ports for connecting to control computers such as Raspberry PI.

Controlling Brushless Motors using Raspberry PI