nice. gotta remember it for robotics season

Posted at 12:10 am on Dec 27th, 2006 by Binome

neat… is it forward-only?

I’d assume so if it references operating in an R/C plane..

Still quite useful to me.

Posted at 12:40 am on Dec 27th, 2006 by Michael Vroegop

damn, those looked really cool, i wish i was nifty with a screwdriver so i could make one.

Posted at 7:30 am on Dec 27th, 2006 by mahder pwned inc.

San Antonio, of all places? :O I live there. Needless to say it’s not the hottest of vacation spots. What brings you down here?

Posted at 10:39 am on Dec 27th, 2006 by mrdelayer

i looked at the diagram and Yes, forward only

Posted at 6:28 pm on Dec 27th, 2006 by RusH

Shouldn’t it be possible to just… reverse the current to reverse the speed? I don’t claim to know everything, pretty new at this, but I would think that it should – all the electric motors I’ve used if you just reverse the current the motor spins the other direction. Or is that not a healthy practice for your motor?

Posted at 12:56 pm on Dec 28th, 2006 by srilyk

You can certainly just reverse the current to reverse the direction of turn; most motors are absolutely fine with it. They do generally have a preferred direction, and won’t run quite as powerfully backwards, but that’s not a big deal.

The trick is, that means that rather than connecting and disconnecting one end of the motor from power with the other connected to ground, now you need to be able to connect and disconnect both ends of the motor to both power and ground. It takes four times as many switching devices to do it. So the cost isn’t in getting the motor to be happy with running backwards, it’s the actual effort required to change the direction of the current through it. This design is of the simpler, unidirectional variety.

Posted at 3:21 pm on Dec 28th, 2006 by jonored