brushless DC motor

13 Articles

3D-Printed Halbach Motor Part Two: Tuning, Testing

June 30, 2017 by 8 Comments

Building your own Halbach-effect brushless DC motor is one thing. Making sure it won’t blow up in your face another matter, and watching how [Christoph Laimer] puts his motor to the test is instructive.

You’ll remember [Christoph]’s giant 3D-printed BLDC motor from a recent post where he gave the motor a quick test spin. That the motor held together under load despite not being balanced is a testament to the quality of his design and the quality of the prints. But not wishing to tempt fate, and having made a few design changes, [Christoph] wisely chose to perform a static balancing of the rotor. He also made some basic but careful measurements of the motor’s parameters, including the velocity constant (Kv) using an electric drill, voltmeter, and tachometer, and the torque using a 3D-printed lever arm and a kitchen scale. All his numbers led him to an overall efficiency of 80%, which is impressive.

[Christoph] is shipping his tested BLDC off to the folks at FliteTest, where he hopes they put it to good use. They probably will — although they might ask for three more for a helicarrier.

Continue reading “3D-Printed Halbach Motor Part Two: Tuning, Testing” →

Fly Across The Water On A 3D-Printed Electric Hydrofoil

June 28, 2017 by 31 Comments

Paddleboards, which are surfboard-like watercraft designed to by stood upon and paddled around calm waters, are a common sight these days. So imagine the surprise on the faces of beachgoers when what looks like a paddleboard suddenly but silently lurches forward and rises up off the surface, lifting the rider on a flight over the water.

That may or may not be [pacificmeister]’s goal with his DIY 3D-printed electric hydrofoil, but it’s likely the result. Currently at part 12 of his YouTube playlist in which he completes the first successful lift-off, [pacificmeister] has been on this project for quite a while and has a lot of design iterations that are pretty instructive — we especially liked the virtual reality walkthrough of his CAD design and the ability to take sections and manipulate them. All the bits of the propulsion pod are 3D-printed, which came in handy when the first test failed to achieve liftoff. A quick redesign of the prop and duct gave him enough thrust to finally fly.

There are commercially available e-foils with a hefty price tag, of course; the header image shows [pacificmeister] testing one, in fact. But why buy it when you can build it? We’ve seen a few hydrofoil builds before, from electric-powered scale models to bicycle powered full-size craft. [pacificmeister]’s build really rises above, though.

[pacificmeister], if you’re out there, this might be a good entry in the Hackaday Prize Wheels, Wings, and Walkers round. Just sayin’.

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A Simple And Educational Brushless Motor

April 23, 2016 by 36 Comments

Sometimes there is no substitute for a real working model to tinker with when it comes to understanding how something works. Take a brushless motor for example. You may know how they work in principle, but what factors affect their operation and how do those factors interact? Inspired by some recent Hackaday posts on brushless motors, [Matt Venn] has built a simple breadboard motor designed for the curious to investigate these devices.

The rotor and motor bodies are laser-cut ply, and the rotor is designed to support multiple magnet configurations. There is only one solenoid, the position of which relative to the magnets on the rotor can be adjusted. The whole assembly is mounted on the edge of a breadboard, and can be rotated relative to the breadboard to vary the phase angle at which the drive circuit’s Hall-effect sensor is activated by the magnet. The drive circuit in turn can have its gain and time constants adjusted to study their effects on the motor’s running.

[Matt] has made all the design files available in his GitHub repository, and has recorded a comprehensive description of the motor’s operation in the YouTube video below the break. Continue reading “A Simple And Educational Brushless Motor” →

Make A BLDC Motor From Scraps You Can Find In The Garage

April 10, 2016 by 15 Comments

Think you’ve got what it takes to build a homebrew brushless motor? As [JaycubL] shows us, it turns out that a bldc motor may be living in pieces right under your nose, in scraps that so many of us would otherwise toss aside. To get our heads turning, [JaycubL] takes us into the theory of brushless DC motors operate. He then builds a homebrew brushless motor using screws, a plastic container, a few bearings, a metal rod, some magnets, and a dab of epoxy. Finally, he gives it a whirl with an off-the-shelf motor controller.

This isn’t [JaycubL’s] first dive into homebrew brushless motors. For the curious, he’s also assembled a fully-functional brushless outrunner motor with a paint can housing.

Sure, understanding the principles is one thing, but being able to take the leap into the real world and find the functional beginnings of a motor from your scrap bin is an entirely different story! [JaycubL’s], dare we say, finesse of understanding the principles behind motor design makes us wonder: how many other functional higher-level electrical and mechanical components can we bootstrap from bitter scrap? To get you started, we’ll point you in the direction of this CNC router that’s just a few steps away from one trip to the hardware store.

Thanks for the tip, [John]!

Continue reading “Make A BLDC Motor From Scraps You Can Find In The Garage” →

A Pragmatic Guide To Motors With Jonathan Beri

December 17, 2015 by 8 Comments

[Jonathan Beri] is a Maker of all sorts, with an affinity for robots, APIs, and Open Source. By day he works on making Android & iOS SDKs easier to use and by night he can found begging a PID controller to “just work already.” Recently he contributed to, “Make: JavaScript Robotics,” printed by Maker Media (2015).

[Jonathan] covers a lot of ground during his motors talk at the 2015 Hackaday SuperConference. He discusses brushed DC, stepper, servo, and brushless motors. Although just scraping the surface of each type of motor [Jonathan] touches the important details you can use to determine which type of motor is best for your project. The slide show he has put together has quite a bit of information and tips for beginners that might go overlooked when choosing a motor. For instance a list of 30 attributes that should be considered when selecting a motor. Included in that list are the 7 attributes [Jonathan] places priority on when he chooses a motor for one of his projects. We’ll delve deeper into that after the break.

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EV Motor Not Powerful Enough? Make Your Own.

November 16, 2015 by 26 Comments

Many of us have tried our hand at the ol’ electric car conversion hack. Yank the engine, throw in an industrial DC or AC motor, and bob’s your uncle. Simple stuff. But if you can’t find just the right motor for your application… why not design and build your own brushless DC motor?

This mind-blowing build is by an electrical engineer who decided to design a 45kW motor (that’s 60HP). That’s not a typo. Design and build a 45kW motor! He has a video series on the design process which includes the CAD and all the calculations he did to make this thing work. Once he had the design complete and ordered the custom parts, he started building it.

In his living room.

Continue reading “EV Motor Not Powerful Enough? Make Your Own.” →