If you aren’t up to date with [Carl Bugeja]’s work with tiny brushless PCB motors, his summary video of his latest design and all the challenges it involved is an excellent overview.
Back in 2018 we saw [Carl]’s earliest versions making their first spins and it was clear he was onto something. Since then they have only improved, but improvement takes both effort and money. Not only does everything seemingly matter at such a small scale, but not every problem is even obvious in the first place. Luckily, [Carl] has both the determination and knowledge to refine things.
The end result of all the work is evident in his most recent test bed: an array of twenty test motors all running continuously at a constant speed of about 37,000 RPM. After a month of this, [Carl] disassembled and inspected each unit. Each motor made over 53 million rotations per day, closing out the month at over 1.6 billion spins. Finding no sign of internal scratches or other damage, [Carl] is pretty happy with the results.
These motors are very capable but are also limited to low torque due to their design, so a big part of things is [Carl] exploring and testing different possible applications. A few fun ones include a wrist-mounted disc launcher modeled after a Spider-Man web shooter, the motive force for some kinetic art, a vibration motor, and more. [Carl] encourages anyone interested to test out application ideas of their own. Even powering a micro drone is on the table, but will require either pushing more current or more voltage, both of which [Carl] plans to explore next.
Getting any ideas? [Carl] offers the MotorCell for sale to help recover R&D costs but of course the design is also open source. The GitHub repository contains code and design details, so go ahead and make them yourself. Or better yet, integrate one directly into your next PCB.
Got an idea for an application that would fit a motor like this? Don’t keep it to yourself, share in the comments.
I’ve been following. It needs more torque to be useful. Looking forward to that work
To be useful in certain obvious applications, sure, but what about applications you haven’t thought of yet?
we have the solution, now we need to find a problem
Nothing new. This tipe of motors are known from ages.
Brushless motors, sure. Forming the stator coil as part of the PCB, I haven’t seen anyone do that before.
Some 3 1/2 floppy drives uses it.
Example? I’m curious to see a commercial application.
that’s the funny part… it’s very hard to find examples of use, even though I found research papers from 1968. that’s because the whole idea is shi- I mean very circumstantial.
PCB antennas, coils, inductors even transformers(planar transformers), but motors? nope. I’m sure pcb motors are used in some niche applications but i don’t know any examples.
“In particular, the printed circuit motor has recently appeared on the market”
thats a quote from
J. H. Davis, “Inductances of Printed Circuit Windings,” Power Apparatus and Systems, IEEE Transactions on, vol. PAS-93, no. 4, pp. 1076-1082, July 1974.
referencing
“Moving Coil DC Servo Motors”, Electromechanical Design, pp. 42-45, June 1968.
This seems to be what I have conflated in my mind with a PCB motor from a floppy drive. Coils are lacquered on so kind of a 2.5d effect.
https://www.reddit.com/r/electronics/comments/4jewzv/pcb_mounted_motor_coils_in_a_floppy_drive/
I don’t see you talking about your whiz-bang new invention either. Do you even have one? Maybe you shouldn’t go making such comments until you do.
That’s… not logical.
We can point out claims that are wrong even if we’ve not done them ourselves.
Don’t criticise my perpetual motion machine, cold fusion reactor, free energy generator, or anti-personal-mine dowsing tool, until you’ve built your own.
This is entirely disingenuous and a deliberate attempt to pretend this project is as useless as conspiracy and delusion driven developments, which just isn’t the case.
Are there a lot of applications for you? Probably not, but some For sure, especially in compact systems requiring high efficiency like embedded cooling and circulation systems. I may have an ideal application in a project of my own, we’ll see when I get past the critical passive design aspects.
This is not even close to being “Entirely disingenuous and a deliberate attempt to pretend this project is as useless as conspiracy and delusion driven developments.” Since Dan’s comment isn’t even mentioning the project itself.
What Dan is talking about is Pelrun’s comment. What Pelrun is saying is that you cannot point out a mistake on a invention if you didn’t invent anything.
Which is completely mindless thing to say.
It would be the same thing as saying that you can’t criticize Michelin star chefs cooking if you are not a Michelin star chef.
What Dan did was an exaggeration, however it was exaggeration simply to get a point across, not to discredit the project.
Thing is, it isn’t a criticism, it is a dismissal. “Oh that’s been done before, boring!”
“Have YOU invented a machine that turns ordinary dog biscuits into India ink? If not, how dare you criticize mine!”
Hooooboy…
Well… I’ve made both a pyrolizer and a ball mill.
Dog biscuits to India ink is just a systems integration problem from there.
This is an argument often used by people who don’t know what they are talking about and are in denial and are letting their ego get the better of them.
You don’t need to have invented something yourself to be able to comment on other people’s inventions or just point out that this actually isn’t new.
Your outburst is the equivalent of people who say that you can’t comment on their “invention” and that you know nothing because you haven’t worked on that exact thing yourself, even though their “invention” uses standard components and ideas.
Your whole comment there was illogical and emotion driven.
It was obviously sarcastic, sorry you can’t tell when people aren’t speaking literally, might want some therapy for that.
If integrated with some small strain gauges, how well would this work as a gyroscopic motion sensor? Mention of it being used as a vibration motor brought to mind the old haptic compass belt, but instead of telling a person which way to go, it could possibly be used to record which way someone has gone.
Gyroscopes these days are not mechanical anymore. They are all solid state now. So I don’t think that’s the right application for it.
Could these be used for the kind of dynamic detent haptic knob things we’ve seen on here a few times? Can’t imagine those need much torque and the relative high cost and large size of the motors those projects used seems like an integrated pcb version would be awesome. Like those powered fader knobs on high end audio mixers, but rotary. Imagine a whole grid of these that rotates automatically to whatever preset for something like a vst plugin. Or even just a input panel like for image editing that can have lots of inputs that are all dynamic feedback.
I was curious about this as well. The main difficulty of the smart knob project is to find a motor with low cogging. Where cogging is the sum of friction while the motor is off. You can feel this as unsmooth motion when the motor is rotated by hand. This parameter is rarely specified, annoyingly. As this motor is coreless it likely has low cogging, but it requires experimentation to determine if it’s useful for a project. I like the idea as PCB motor are relatively cheap and are small.
If that’s an issue, I guess you could bias the haptic signal, i.e. keep the motor spinning all the time, and change the speed to produce feedback. Obviously then power consumption becomes an issue, but you might be able to design the UI so that you have 1 or 2 seconds’ warning before the haptic feedback is needed, and can power it up on demand.
Given the moment, this could be interesting as a component in more complex haptic systems.
Hi, one interesting application could be an insect ornithocopter. A fully integrated PCB system. These motors are great for continuous high rpm operation which is not suitable for drone but an micro ornithocopter(insect) would do great.
Also, a fixed wing micro aircraft would do great with these.
Flettner rotocraft >> ornithopters.
😂
What about on pcb local cooling.
I was thinking the same thing, especially for high torque motor controllers and transistors. Rather than needing a giant fan, there could be smaller ones that are more localized. Of course it still has to remove the heat, not just spread it around; the cooling systems in MacBook airs and the older slim designs from 2016 come to mind for air exchange design ideas. If they could be made smaller I could see them integrated in haptic feedback VR suits. While transducers might be a better alternative, I think some broad patents get in the way for using them in haptic feedback applications. Apple and Sony both come to mind. But an array of these could offer more ooomf than the linear vibration motors.
reminds me of mems active cooling on a chip :)
https://xmems.com/press-release/xmems-introduces-1mm-thin-active-micro-cooling-fan-on-a-chip/
Localized laminar flow control augmentation/stall induction on a higher-speed tailless BWB drone? Really small fan blades, spin one direction to for boundary layer control, spin the other direction to induce flow separation and increase the drag for that portion of the wing.
Could you use a design like this as a small wind turbine to generate power to a supercap? That might be interesting for outdoor sensor projects..
This seems to be really adapted to make analog gauges, seems easy and cheap to make, small footprint, easy leds or marking ( stencil or copper) …
Interesting…
Idea could be old, idea is, for me, 20% of the job, 80% is the real life expérimentation. Good game, Carl, good game, be sure I will dive in your work next time I have a multi gauge dashboard to make