This Tiny Motor Is Built Into A PCB

January 24, 2018 by 53 Comments

Mounting a motor on a PCB is nothing new, right? But how about making the PCB itself part of the motor? That’s what [Carl Bugeja] has done with his brushless DC motor in a PCB project, and we think it’s pretty cool.

Details on [Carl]’s Hackaday.io page are a bit sparse at this point, but we’ve been in contact with him and he filled us in a little. The PCB contains the stator of the BLDC and acts as a mechanical support for the rotor’s bearing. There are six spiral coils etched into the PCB, each with about 40 turns. The coils are distributed around the axis; connected in a wye configuration, they drive a 3D-printed rotor that has four magnets pressed into it. You can see a brief test in the video below; it seems to suffer from a little axial wobble due to the single bearing, but that could be handled with a hat board supporting an upper bearing.

We see a lot of potential in this design. [Carl] mentions that the lack of cores in the coil limit it to low-torque applications, but it seems feasible to bore out the center of the coils and press-fit a ferrite slug. Adding SMD Hall sensors to the board for feedback would be feasible, too — in fact, an entire ESC and motor on one PCB could be possible as well. [Carl] has promised to keep the project page updated, and we’re looking forward to more on this one.

For a more traditional approach to printed motors, check out this giant 3D-printed BLDC.

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Fail Of The Week: Motorizing A PCB Cutting Shear

August 29, 2013 by 43 Comments

This week’s fail is an attempt to retrofit a PCB cutting shear with a geared motor. The project was undertaken by [David Cook]. Incidentally he’s very near and dear to us as his book Robot Building for Beginners got us started with hacking in the first place.

This $200 shearing tool is hand-operated and can cut through boards up to 1/16″ thick. But [David] really had to crank on the thing to make a cut. This often resulted in crooked board edges. He decided to do the retrofit in order to achieve higher precision. He sourced a high-torque motor from eBay for around $50 delivered.

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The $16 PCB Robot

March 6, 2024 by 20 Comments

It is a fun project to build a simple robot but, often, the hardest part these days is creating the mechanical base. [Concrete Dog] has a new open source design for stoRPer that uses a PC board as the base. The board has a Raspberry Pi Pico and motor drivers. The modular design allows you to add to it easily and use custom wheels. The video below shows some treaded wheels and some mechanum wheels with gears.

There are mounting holes for sensors and also a way to put another deck above to hold other circuits, power, or whatever you like. There’s lots you could do with this as a starting point.

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3D Mouse With 3D Printed Flexures And PCB Coils

January 31, 2024 by 7 Comments

3D mice with six degrees of freedom (6DOF) motion are highly valued by professional CAD users. However, the entry-level versions typically cost upwards of $150 and are produced by a single manufacturer. [Colton Baldridge] has created the OS3M Mouse — an open source alternative using PCB coils and 3D printed flexures.

The primary challenges in creating a 6DOF input device, similar to the 3Dconnexion Space Mouse, lie in developing a mechanical coupling that enables full range motion, and electronics capable of precisely and consistently measuring this motion. After several iterations of printed flexure combinations and trip down the finite element analysis (FEA) rabbit hole, [Colton] had a working single-piece mechanical solution.

To measure the knob’s movement accurately, [Colton] employs inductive sensing. Inductance to Digital Converters (LDCs) assess the inductive alterations across three pairs of PCB coils, each having an opposing metal disk mounted on the knob. This setup allows [Colton] to use a Stewart platform‘s kinematic model calculate the  knob’s relative position. The calculation are done on an STM32 which also acts USB HID send the position data to a computer. For the demo [Colton] created a simple C++ app to translate the position data to Solidworks API calls.

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Pi Zero FPV Robot Uses Tiny Motor & Gears

November 14, 2023 by 4 Comments

We’ve seen plenty of first-person view (FPV) robots built using the Raspberry Pi Zero, but this one from [Shane] has an interesting twist: rather than directly driving the wheels from big motors, it uses small motors and gearboxes to drive the wheels, with some of the gears being 3D printed.

[Shane] has posted the full details of this cute little robot, complete with 3D models, code, and plans for the PCB that connects the Zero to the motors. These motors are N20 ones, which are much smaller and cheaper than what we usually see used in these projects, and run faster. They also often come with a gearbox that reduces the speed to something a bit more useful. Each motor drives the two wheels on one side through a 3D printed gear for tank-style steering.

To run the whole thing off a single LiPo battery, [Shane] also designed his own Pi Hat that converted the voltage to 5 V and added a couple of H bridge chips for the motors. It is a cute little build, but the requirement for a custom Pi hat perhaps puts it beyond most beginners, who might be interested in a cheap, straightforward build like this. Does anybody have any alternatives?

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You Can Now Order A Brand-New Amiga PCB

October 19, 2023 by 30 Comments

The Commodore 64 has been pulled apart, reverse engineered, replicated, and improved upon to no end over the last four decades or so. The Amiga 500 has had less attention, in part due to its greater level of sophistication. However, you can now order a brand-new Amiga-compatible PCB if you’re looking to put together a machine from surplus parts.

The design is known as Denise, and is apparently the work of an anonymous Swedish designer according to the Tindie listing. It’s not a direct replica of any one Amiga machine. Instead, it’s best described as “a compact A500+ compatible motherboard with two Zorro2 slots and a few additional features.”

Denise is just a PCB, though. No emulated chips or other components are included. To use the PCB, you’ll need a full set of Amiga custom chips and a suitable Motorola 68000-series CPU to suit. It can be used with either OCS or ECS chipsets. At this stage, it’s only verified to work with the 2MB version of the Agnus chip, though the creators believe it should work with a 1MB “Diet Agnus.”  Some modern conveniences are on hand, too. A pair of microcontrollers will allow the use of Amiga or PC keyboards, along with Amiga or PS/2 style mice, including support for scroll wheels.

Given the number of damaged, battered, and corroded Amiga PCBs out there, it’s great that there is a source of fresh, new PCBs for restoration purposes. Video after the break.

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Flexure PCB Actuators Made Before Your Very Eyes

August 24, 2023 by 10 Comments

When we see something from [Carl Bugeja], we expect to see flexible PCBs and magnets being pushed to do unexpected things. His latest video in which he designs a set of PCB actuators using flexure joints certainly doesn’t fail to please.

His intent is to create a simple actuator in which a magnet is placed over a coil, and moves upward within the confines of he flexure which surrounds it. And rather than try individual designs one after the other he’s created a huge all-in-one test array of different flexure actuators, each having a slightly different design and construction to whichever one is next to it. There are plenty of magnet flips as he tests them, and using this approach he’s quickly able to eliminate the designs which work less well.

To give an idea how these actuators might be best used, he tried them in a few applications. Their lifting force is relatively tiny, but he found them possibly suitable for a haptic feedback device. Of particular interest is that as the structure is a PCB it’s relatively straightforward to run a line to the magnet and turn it into a touch sensor. The idea of an all in one sensor and haptic feedback component is rather appealing, we think.

If you’ve not seen Carl’s work before, we’ve encountered him many times over the years.

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