Collaborate Disseminate
What is a brushless ESC, really? Well, generally, it’s usually a microcontroller with a whole lot of power transistors hanging off it to drive three phases of brushless motor coils. [Frank …read more Continue reading Brushless ESC Becomes Dual-Motor Brushed ESC With A Few Changes
Starter motors aren’t typically a great choice for motorized projects, as they’re designed to give engines a big strong kick for a few seconds. Driving them continuously can often quickly …read more Continue reading Heavy-Duty Starter Motor Powers An Awesome Drift Trike
Do you have a hundred bucks and some time to kill? [Peter Sripol] invites you to come along with him and build a remotely operated submarine with only the most basic, …read more Continue reading Low Buck PVC ROV IS Definitely a MVP
Casually browsing YouTube for “shop improvements” yields a veritable river of project ideas, objects for cat amusement, and 12 INCREDIBLE SHOP HACKS YOU WON’T BELIEVE, though some of these are of predictably dubious value. So you might imagine that when we found [Henrique]’s adorable disc sander we dismissed it out of hand, how useful could such a tiny tool be? But then we remembered the jumbo tub o’ motors on the shelf and reconsidered, maybe a palm sized sander has a place in the tiny shop.
Electrically the build is a simple as can be. It’s just a brushed DC …read more
Continue reading Adorable Desktop Disc Sander Warms Our Hearts and Our Parts
A motor — or a generator — requires some normal magnets and some electromagnets. The usual arrangement is to have a brushed commutator that both powers the electromagnets and switches their polarity as the motor spins. Permanent magnets don’t rotate and attract or repel the electromagnets as they swing by. That can be a little hard to visualize, but if you 3D Print [Miller’s Planet’s] working model — or just watch the video below — you can see how it all works.
We imagine the hardest part of this is winding the large electromagnets. Getting the axle — a nail …read more
Continue reading 3D Printed Brushed Motor is Easy to Visualize
A big part of the Hackaday Prize this year is robotics modules, and already we’ve seen a lot of projects adding intelligence to motors. Whether that’s current sensing, RPM feedback, PID control, or adding an encoder, motors are getting smart. Usually, though, we’re talking about fancy brushless motors or steppers. The humble DC brushed motor is again left out in the cold.
This project is aiming to fix that. It’s a smart motor driver for dumb DC brushed motors. You know, the motors you can buy for pennies. The motors that are the cheapest way to add movement to any …read more
We’ve seen some cheap quadcopter builds over the years, but this one takes the cake. After seeing somebody post a joke about building a quadcopter frame out of zip ties and hot glue, [IronMew] decided to try it for real. The final result is a micro quadcopter that actually flies half-way decently and seems to be fairly resistant to crash damage thanks to the flexible structure.
The first attempts at building the frame failed, as the zip ties (unsurprisingly) were too flexible and couldn’t support the weight of the motors. Eventually, [IronMew] realized that trying to replicate the traditional quadcopter …read more
Continue reading Zip Tie Quadcopter Frame is as Cheap as They Come
The Seadoo GTI Sea Scooter is a simple conveyance, consisting of a DC motor and a big prop in a waterproof casing. By grabbing on and firing the motor, it can be used to propel oneself underwater. However, [ReSearchITEng] had problems with their unit, and did what hackers do best – cracked it open to solve the problem.
Investigation seemed to suggest there were issues with the logic of the motor controller. The original circuit had a single FET, potentially controlled through PWM. The user interfaced with the controller through a reed switch, which operates magnetically. Using reed switches is …read more
