Many of us have made electric transport of some form, whether a Hacky Racer, and e-bike, a go-kart, or whatever. We have invariably bought a motor, or if we are really adventurous, repurposed a car alternator. Not [Birdbrain] though, because she’s designed and built her own from first principles.
The video below goes into significant detail on the design of her motor, looking at cores, wire sixes, and configurations with a useful simulation along the way. We particularly like the way she uses a bandsaw to cut transformer laminations to shape for her core. The 3D printed housing initially isn’t strong enough for the forces induced by the magnets, but she attacks that problem with a new print. The motor works well, and as an added bonus there’s an introduction to the different types of motor driver. It seems the cheap ones don’t deliver a good waveform for the characteristics of the motor. Sadly she doesn’t fit it to a real bike in the video, but it seems this thing might just work.
If you lack the courage to make the whole thing from scratch, we took a quick look at the car alternator route a while back.
I am confused about her end goal. Is it to make the motor more efficient? Or is this just a DIY for anyone with a ton of time on there hands?
It’s a video made for the sake of attracting the gaze of The Algorithm.
As long as some science or tech words get used, and something happens, the video is complete.
On a personal level. I’m sure they learned a lot.
But there is no goal for the video beyond entertainment.
Sadly he failed because he didn’t have the neccesary toots and parts to make an axial flux motor which will actually work under load .
*she
“The video below goes into significant detail on the design of her motor, looking at cores, wire sixes, and configurations with a useful simulation along the way.” What are wire sixes?
Think it’s supposed to be ‘wire sizes’.
Unwrapping the geometry into a straight line to use with the FEMM planar simulation was clever, gotta remember that one.
‘courage to make the whole thing from scratch’?
Electric motors currently max out at about 85%+ efficiency.
‘Courage’ isn’t the word ur looking for.
Going first principles on material so well trodden is an act of arrogance.
Unless you actually improve something, best to keep your shame private.
God forbid someone builds something for fun instead of buying one on Hackaday?
You’re being overly harsh.
“Going first principles on material so well trodden is an act of learning and fun.”
There you go, fixed it for you.
better watch this then instead…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KP30IV0YebE
(though I share your allergic reaction to yet another motor-shaped build that starts with fundamentally wrong materials and drags self to inevitable failure. At least this time the creator begins by listing her “sins” and then sets out to make something that achieves a real-world task)
She isn’t the one shamed here, mate.
I mean good for her I watch these being built and rebuilt in Pakistan on YouTube lol in the dirt and the guys wearing sandals. Going from scratch is cool fun but its not practical just for learning experience
Remember reading about a HDD disk driver motor chip. The torque ripple would warp the disk sufficiently to have a real impact in the be drive capacity.
To provide a consistent smooth torque the driver would “learn” the optimal drive waveform during a calibration procedure where, by spinning the motor up, going tri-state, and then looking at the resulting signals from the drive. This would be stored in a wave table for future use.
I can’t remember if a load resistor was applied or not. Either way, something like this could be applied to a general motor diver, the catch is that isn’t ideally needs to be calibred on that one specific motor first. And unlike HDD, the real world usually has hardware attached to the spinning motor.
Good god. Why so many negative comments? Fair play to anyone who wants to make something they can quiet eailly buy off the shelf, almost definitely to a higher standard, purely for the hell of it! It’s activities like this which makes engineers.