Collaborate Disseminate
There’s great potential in salvaging a motor from a broken appliance, but so often the part in question is very specific to its application, presenting a puzzle of wires to …read more Continue reading Washing Machine Motors Unlocked
Somewhere in most engineering educations, there’s a class on induction motors. Students learn about shaded-pole motors, two-phase and three-phase motors, squirrel cage motors, and DC-excited motors. It’s a pre-requisite for …read more Continue reading Double Fed Induction Motors: Clever Motor Control Through Frequency
If you watch YouTube long enough, it seems like going “off the grid” is all the rage these days. But what if the thing that goes off the grid is the …read more Continue reading Restarting The Grid When The Grid Is Off The Grid
It’s not uncommon to drive around the neighborhood on trash day and see one or two ceiling fans haphazardly strewn onto a pile of garbage bags, ready to be carted off to the town dump. It’s a shame to see something like this go to waste, and [Giesbert Nijhuis] decided …read more
Continue reading Turn a Ceiling Fan Into a Wind Turbine… Almost
Big ol’ motors are great when you need to get a big job done, but they can be expensive or hard to source new. However, there’s a source of big, fat, juicy motors right at home for most people – the garden variety washing machine. These motors would usually require a special controller, however [Jerry] is here to show us how to hack the controller that comes with the machine.
The hack begins as [Jerry] decides to gut a Maytag MAH7500 Neptune front loader. Many projects exist that borrow the motor but rely on a seperately sourced variable frequency drive, …read more
When you think of who invented the induction motor, Nikola Tesla and Galileo Ferraris should come to mind. Though that could be a case of the squeaky wheel being the one that gets the grease. Those two were the ones who fought it out just when the infrastructure for these motors was being developed. Then again, Tesla played a huge part in inventing much of the technology behind that infrastructure.
Although they claimed to have invented it independently, nothing’s ever invented in a vacuum, and there was an interesting progression of both little guys and giants that came before them; …read more
The phrase “Tesla vs. Edison” conjures up images of battling titans, mad scientists, from a bygone age. We can easily picture the two of them facing off, backed by glowing corona with lightning bolts emitting from their hands. The reality is a little different though. Their main point of contention was Tesla’s passion for AC vs. Edison’s drive to create DC power systems to power his lights. Their personalities also differed in many ways, the most relevant one here being their vastly different approaches to research. Here, then, is the story of their rivalry.
Nikola Tesla’s …read more
