Microfluidic Motors Could Work Really Well For Tiny Scale Tasks

November 14, 2024 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

The vast majority of motors that we care about all stick to a theme. They rely on the electromagnetic dance between electrons and magnets to create motion. They come in all shapes and sizes and types, but fundamentally, they all rely on electromagnetic principles at heart.

And yet! This is not the only way to create a motor. Electrostatic motors exist, for example, only they’re not very good because electrostatic forces are so weak by comparison. Only, a game-changing motor technology might have found a way to leverage them for more performance. It achieves this by working with fluid physics on a very small scale.

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Small Volumetric Lamp Spins At 6000 RPM

October 31, 2024 by Lewin Day 6 Comments

Volumetric displays are simply cool. Throw some LEDs together, take advantage of persistence of vision, and you’ve really got something. [Nick Electronics] shows us how its done with his neat little volumetric lamp build.

The concept is simple. [Nick] built a little device to spin a little rectangular array of LEDs. A small motor in the base provides the requisite rotational motion at a speed of roughly 6000 rpm. To get power to the LEDs while they’re spinning, the build relies on wire coils for power transmission, instead of the more traditional technique of using slip rings.

The build doesn’t do anything particularly fancy—it just turns on the whole LED array and spins it. That’s why it’s a lamp, rather than any sort of special volumetric display. Still, the visual effect is nice. We’ve seen some other highly capable volumetric displays before, though. Video after the break.
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A Wobble Disk Air Motor With One Moving Part

October 22, 2024 by Dan Maloney 17 Comments

In general, the simpler a thing is, the better. That doesn’t appear to apply to engines, though, at least not how we’ve been building them. Pistons, cranks, valves, and seals, all operating in a synchronized mechanical ballet to extract useful work out of some fossilized plankton.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though, if the clever engineering behind this wobbling disk air engine is any indication. [Retsetman] built the engine as a proof-of-concept, and the design seems well suited to 3D printing. The driven element of the engine is a disk attached to the equator of a sphere — think of a model of Saturn — with a shaft running through its axis. The shaft is tilted from the vertical by 20° and attached to arms at the top and bottom, forming a Z shape. The whole assembly lives inside a block with intake and exhaust ports. In operation, compressed air enters the block and pushes down on the upper surface of the disk. This rotates the disc and shaft until the disc moves above the inlet port, at which point the compressed air pushes on the underside of the disc to continue rotation.

[Resetman] went through several iterations before getting everything to work. The main problems were getting proper seals between the disc and the block, and overcoming the friction of all-plastic construction. In addition to the FDM block he also had one printed from clear resin; as you can see in the video below, this gives a nice look at the engine’s innards in motion. We’d imagine a version made from aluminum or steel would work even better.

If [Resetman]’s style seems familiar, it’s with good reason. We’ve featured plenty of his clever mechanisms, like this pericyclic gearbox and his toothless magnetic gearboxes.

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DIY 3D-Printed Arduino Self-Balancing Cube

October 13, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 16 Comments

Self-balancing devices present a unique blend of challenge and innovation. That’s how [mircemk]’s project caught our eye. While balancing cubes isn’t a new concept — Hackaday has published several over the years — [mircemk] didn’t fail to impress. This design features a 3D-printed cube that balances using reaction wheels. Utilizing gyroscopic sensors and accelerometers, the device adapts to shifts in weight, enabling it to maintain stability.

At its core, the project employs an Arduino Nano microcontroller and an MPU6050 gyroscope/accelerometer to ensure precise control. Adding nuts and bolts to the reaction wheels increases their weight, enhancing their impact on the cube’s balance. They don’t hold anything. They simply add weight. The construction involves multiple 3D printed components, each requiring several hours to produce, including the reaction wheels and various mount plates. After assembly, users can fine-tune the device via Bluetooth, allowing for a straightforward calibration process to set the balancing points.

If you want to see some earlier incarnations of this sort of thing, we covered other designs in 2010, 2013, and 2016. These always remind us of Stewart platforms, which are almost the same thing turned inside out.

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Mobile Coffee Table Uses Legs To Get Around

September 10, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

For getting around on most surfaces, it’s hard to beat the utility of the wheel. Versatile, inexpensive, and able to be made from a wide array of materials has led to this being a cornerstone technology for the past ten thousand years or so. But with that much history it can seem a little bit played out. To change up the locomotion game, you might want to consider using robotic legs instead. That’s what [Giliam] designed into this mobile coffee table which uses custom linkages to move its legs and get itself from place to place around the living room.

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An Open Source 6kW GaN Motor Controller

August 19, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 30 Comments

We don’t know how you feel when designing hardware, but we get uncomfortable at the extremes. High voltage or current, low noise figures, or extreme frequencies make us nervous. [Orion Serup] from CrabLabs has been turning up a few of those variables and has created a fairly beefy 3-phase motor driver using GaN technology that can operate up to 80V at 70A. GaN semiconductors are a newer technology that enables greater power handling in smaller packages than seems possible, thanks to high electron mobility and thermal conductivity in the material compared to silicon.

The KiCAD schematic shows a typical high-power driver configuration, broken down into a gate pre-driver, the driver itself, and the following current and voltage sense sub-circuits. As is typical with high-power drivers, these operate in a half-bridge configuration with identical N-channel GaN transistors (specifically part EPC2361) driven by dedicated gate drivers (that’s the pre-driver bit) to feed enough current into the device to enable it to switch quickly and reliably.

The design uses the LM1025 low-side driver chip for this task, as you’d be hard-pushed to drive a GaN transistor with discrete components! You may be surprised that the half-bridge driver uses a pair of N-channel devices, not a symmetric P and N arrangement, as you might use to drive a low-power DC motor. This is simply because, at these power levels, P-channel devices are a rarity.

Why are P-channel devices rare? N-channel devices utilise electrons as the majority charge carrier, but P-channel devices utilise holes, and the mobility of holes in GaN is very low compared to that of electrons, resulting in much worse ON-resistance in a P-channel and, as a consequence, limited performance. That’s why you rarely see P-channel devices in a circuit like this.

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You Can Build A Little Car That Goes Farther Than You Push It

July 11, 2024 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Can you build a car that travels farther than you push it? [Tom Stanton] shows us that you can, using a capacitor and some nifty design tricks.

[Tom]’s video shows us the construction of a small 3D printed trike with a curious drivetrain. There’s a simple generator on board, which charges a capacitor when the trike is pushed along the ground. When the trike is let go, however, this generator instead acts as a motor, using energy stored in the capacitor to drive the trike further.

When put to the test by [Tom], both a freewheeling car and the capacitor car are pushed up to a set speed. But the capacitor car goes farther. The trick is simple – the capacitor car can go further because it has more energy. But how?

It’s all because more work is being done to push the capacitor car up to speed. It stores energy in the capacitor while it’s being accelerated by the human pushing it. In contrast, after being pushed, the freewheeling car merely coasts to a stop as it loses kinetic energy. However, the capacitor car has similar kinetic energy plus the energy stored in its capacitor, which it can use to run its motor.

It’s a neat exploration of some basic physics, and useful learning if you’ve ever wondered about the prospects of perpetual motion machines.

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