Your tenacity is commendable, the amount of iterations you've gone through on all these PCB coil projects is simply staggering to me, I usually give up after revision 3.
@@timteecvhn it can give speed but no torque.. because of the coil limitations in that pcb..But it can be used in many places...but if you put a heavy proppler on it, the rpm will go down
Lots of good advice in the comments: hitting permanent magnets reduces their strength, use coolant when machining iron, a simple hand vice to put in the bearings would help prevent damaging the outer race,
Also the way he mounted the magnets in the steel part is shorting them, it would be better to have a magnetic plate as a flux carrier and sandwich the four holes on top made from pcb material so N-S of the magnets is not connected via magnetically conductive material.
@ Carl Bugeja & Robert F You are conflating Iron and Steel, you should use coolant with STEEL, Iron is self lubricating because of its high carbon content which acts like graphite during the cutting process. In machine Iron, be prepared for a tremendous mess, the carbon dust will coat everything in a certain distance
One of the great things about online forums is that you can get a lot of good advice from people who have been there, done that. Recently, someone asked how to make a PCB motor and got a lot of great responses. Some people suggested using permanent magnets, but others warned that hitting them with a machining bit reduces their strength. It's a good idea to use coolant when machining iron because it helps to keep the heat down and prevents the workpiece from warping.
adding small air vanes to the side of your stater to encourage air movement though the PCB with holes in it might help control the thermals. A lot of high power motors use this design.
To encourage air movement through the PCB with holes, small air vanes can be added to the sides of your stater. This will create a more efficient system by increasing the amount of air that is able to flow through the PCB. Additionally, this will also help cool the motor by drawing in cooler air from outside the enclosure.
For calculating torque, you should instead make an inertial dynamometer. Basically a fly wheel that you attach to and spin up with the motor and monitor RPM, based on it's angular acceleration and the fly wheel's known polar moment of inertia, you can build a torque vs. speed curve that's much more accurate. Ideally this should be done using 2 fly wheels of different mass so that you can calibrate out the rotor's inertia, but if the rotor's inertia is much less than the flywheel or the accuracy needed is low, then this can be done with only 1
Great option, I was thinking the same thing! Was kinda flabbergasted that he said "the second method was less accurate", since the first method also takes in the acceleration by the gravitational forces. Basically the same thing as hitting one of those carnival attractions, the one where you strike with a hammer trying to make a bell go "Dingggg" (don't know the name) ;p.
I have worked a little with a company that is makes PCB motors commercially. The primary engineering challenge is heat removal, the method you are using is pretty much the way to do it. The next step is to add an aluminum housing as a much larger heatsink. The rotor is typically on both sides on the PCB. Two bearings further apart assists in removing wobble of the rotor. The next engineering challenge is that you get a very low copper to rotor ratio. One way to get around this is making a motor with a very large outer diameter, the other is to sandwich multiple together. By having a stack, you can utilize the same rotor magnet on both sides on a sandwiched PCB. From a power/efficiency compared to weight, these motors are not competitive with traditional wound motors, however I see a future for low cost designs where size and weight is not as critical. Using an extruded heatsink ring that mounts to the end would allow the assembly to easily scale up or down my increasing length with common componentry sandwiched together.
I think carbide will still do better with cast iron over HSS - HSS wants a lower SFM thus lower RPM during cutting or it tends to burn up. The Othermill doesn't spin slower than 10k- whereas I'd want to be cutting at less than half that RPM for a .125" endmill on a regular milling machine. Coolant could definitely help with the issue of burn up - spraying a bit of WD40 or a cutting lubricant can also work in a pinch.
Hi Carl. If you extend the idea of decreasing magnetic reluctance from your iron rotor to the stator you could stick a tile of high frequency ferrite material to the opposite side of the stator. I reckon you should get significantly more torque that way. But since you then also increase PCB coil inductance you most likely will decrease the motor Kv value so you will the need a higher supply voltage to maintain max rpm. Looking forward to your next improved motor!
Great work! Good idea to use printed fixtures. About the bearing: When journalling a shaft using deep groove radial ball bearings, you need to use two of them, not just one (unless it is a cross roller bearing, which is not available in such small sizes). In your case you could get away with stacking one on top of the other. This would get rid of that wobble and should improve performance as fluctuations in the air gap distance would be reduced. Also, it is best to press the magnets in; a convenient way is to use a small pillar drill.
a bit worried about whether the iron backplate has short-circuited some magnetic flux or not, because the magnets are sunk totally inside the backplate. maybe the holes should be shallower.
I've heard that hitting magnets isn't the best idea; this may be for old-school magnets so possibly worthy of further investigation. Maybe a vice or some other parallel compression method might improve things possibly?
No, still goes for exotic magnets. You reduce their strength. Those definitely need to be pressed in. The same with the bearing, but for different reasons. Ball bearings are designed to take a radial load, not an axial load. Hitting it in can deflect the cage and cause the rolling drag to increase.
Magnets have been around for centuries and are still popular today. However, magnets may not be the best idea for making PCBs or motors. Magnets can be very strong and can easily damage or pull apart delicate parts. In addition, they can be difficult to remove if they are accidentally attached to a component. Magnets should only be used if there is no other way to hold a component in place.
For real. KiCAD is free, open source *and* cross platform. Meanwhile Altium is none of those, and costs 3,500€ *per year*. That's 15 Adobe licenses. Totally absurd. They must be running a good racket on whatever businesses pay for this.
At this moment, KICAD lacks on some features comparing to Altium, but the kicad developers make great improvements on each version. I have already used it in some professional projects. More than 10 years ago Eagle was a promising tool, you had a Free Software version (even available in Ubuntu 2008 packages). But since about 2017, they changed their strategy, they were bought by Autodesk, and from version 4.7 to 9, they have not improved anything at all. They have only made an ANNUAL PAYMENT LICENSE with very annoying authentication system by smarthphone and time limited code. And continues without proper hierarchical design. KiCAD instead has improved remarkably from version 3 to 5, has hierarchical design, trace length matching (this works very well, so this brings you the possibility to digital high speed design), and python scripting. If Kicad continues to improve, we will soon have a tool capable of competing directly with Altium.
I mean, I have a small quadcopter that's basically a PCB with 4 motors on it. The main difference here would just be that the motors would be built in to the PCB itself.
Brilliant video. I love the determination. If you get the rotor recut, maybe look at making some curved channels on the back to act as a small low flow fan over the pcb.
Nice work sir! Keep this motor idea in mind. The number 1 killer of all motors is heat. When ever you can, find the best way dissipate heat. Air flow will provide the cooling for sure. Your current changes will change the temp. Also as you found. Hint - Standard AC motors use their rotor (on an ODP motor) as the fan for air flow. Using both rotor and stator design, in harmony, you can create the optimum airflow you may need.
Great work. For the shaft/bearing setup, it is recommended to use a pair of ball bearings for supporting the shaft and the shaft could be a shoulder screw instead of a normal fully threaded screw. These changes should minimize the wobble you are seeing.
Yep, sandwiched steel plates is the traditional way to avoid eddy currents in motors . A very traditional brushless design is to have a rotor made of stacked plates separated by oxidation, dipped in conductive aluminium to form shorted rotor windings that make the rotor respond to the 3 phase rotating magnetic field from the stator. Thus there are no permanent magnets and the rotor is formed from stacked plates cut/stamped into a designed shape, clamped and dipped.
@@maxhouseman3129 I was thinking a central brain that you could plug these arms into. Interchange them... Maybe even plug in other things.. sensors, wheels, whatever.. could be a terrific teaching tool.
There are many new improvements with PCB Motor. For starters, the unboxing experience is much better. The initial testing yielded good results, and the iron rotor provides significantly more torque. Additionally, the shaft mount makes it much easier to install and use. Finally, the torque testing showed that this motor is extremely powerful. Overall, these new features make PCB Motor a much better product.
This is so awesome. You need to make the pcb press fit for a bearing and you need the magnet housing press fit for a shaft. Bonus points if you add a second pcb board that mounts to the first with another press fit bearing and mounting holes so you can mate this to a planetary (or other) gear box. That will allow this to easily drive your 2wd robot while getting more consistant readings/results. If this comes across as rude or intrusive I appologize.
Stators are made of a special iron alloy with silicon, silicon steel. The addition helps keep temperatures lower with changing magnetic fields, and helps the stator "drop" the field faster, for less hysteresis. I have a few plates left. I originally sent to oshcut for some custom stator lamination. They were interested in attempting the material
The "real" temperature test is quite hard to do in a home lab.... Ideally you want to measure the motor structure heat - per watt of mechanical energy delivered. For steady state RPM's this is only really doable if you have a reference motor bench with constant load RPM and a torque meter on the coupling shaft. Good work, really interesting to see :)
awesome project! I think there could be another reason, why temps improve with higher speeds: the faster magnets move over the coils, the more they themselfs will actually induce a voltage, opposing the driving voltage. that will result in lower currents, and is usually the reason why typical electric motors have the highest torque at start up (higher current- stronger magnetic field - more torque). you could easily test that by measuring the amps drawn at different speeds.
I think you could further increase the torque by building a rotor with magnets on either side of the PCB. Besides the additional flux from the added magnets such a arrangement is likely decreasing flux leakage by a lot
A cool project idea for these struck me today - a quad copter. If you could write custom controller code for a small microcontroller and add a battery, you might be able to have a quad copter milled and assembled and sent to you save for the propellers. PCBs are pretty lightweight but also decently strong, so being able to just order some quad copter a cheaply from a PCB mill would be pretty cool. Heck, maybe the military could put electronically-activated explosives on them and get a cheap source of controllable missiles lol
The magnets will probably attract to the iron heatsink and based on why previous test I think the coil's magnetic field wouldn't be strong enough to overcome that attraction and rotate the rotor
@@CarlBugeja Didn't PCB way just release an aluminum PCB substrate? Would love to see the motor on that. It would, in effect, have a built in heatsink. Right?
@@Scott_C quite possibly, perhaps one could design the rotor such that it has a fan coupled/built into it, in the name of reducing part count. Like the shaft passes through the pcb to drive a small fan on the back etc.
This is absolutely awesome. I bet if you glued small ingots behind the PCB at the center of each coil you'll increase the torque significantly. If you can get thin slivers of iron in 0.1-0.3mm thicknesses and you sandwich the slivers with some spray paint as the dielectric you'll cut out a lot of the Eddy currents.
Those motors would be a great upgrade for people who have models of the TOS Enterprise. The could use them for the rotating bussard lighting on the front of the nacelles. The motors which are being used at the moment are very loud. The rotating engine lights of the TOS Jupiter 2 also pops to mind. I am sure there are other model kits which use conventional motors for lighting effects. It's something to think about.
Why don't you use a powerful magnets on the other side to keep the iron stable while drilling. Good job. Thank you for sharing your innovations with us
Although I did not understand anything Because it's not my place but i enjoyed Thanks And you are a person with great patience Deal with problems calmly
Use super glue to hold the parts you want to machine, at end try breaking the glue bond or dissolve the glue. Never use double sided tape for small contact area parts.
Carl -- I admire your effort, but I think the iron you've added is not guiding the magnetic field very usefully. It would be better to stick with a plastic rotor (with magnets embedded in it), and do a better job guiding the motor coil flux to operate on those magnets. Assuming the board is laying flat, so Z axis is up, the mag fields of the magnets and the coils are parallel with the Z axis. But you're not providing a low-reluctance path for the mag fields from below the board and from above the rotor to curve around and complete the mag circuit. What I think you need is 6 "C"-shaped iron pieces that pick up the magnetic field below each coil and guide it around to above that same coil, so that you maximize the motor flux operating on the rotor magnets.
Sounds right, the rotor magnets are poled through their thickness, the steel reaches both flat faces so they likely steal flux by routing it away from the exposed faces. An air gap around the magnets might be a better idea. The field coils have no help at all, maybe some ferrite C cores can be used but even a big ferrite washer might be better. Trick to visual use magnetic fields, wonder if there’s some cad for that.
Next step is manufacturing custom shape and magnetic field rotor so it is own housing and magnet, while shape allowing air to blow trough it, also holes in PCB for air to be able to blow trough it.
I'd recommend to set up design rules in Altium Designer to avoid silly mistakes in future. Design rule check really helps to find either undesired net connections or layout that goes beyond manufacturer's capabilities.
If you are using Altium Designer to design PCBs, it would be interesting to make a series of videos to teach how to use the software. Something fast and intuitive, nothing like the most videos that are out there on the internet/youtube... 1) PCB design process (from schematic to pcb and design considerations) 2) Draw schematic 3) Import schematic to PCB 4) Layers and grlound plane 5) Create my own components etc ... Great video btw :)
You STILL have not completed the magnetic circuit through the stator. You can DRAMATICALLY increase your torque by putting a second rotor on the other side of the stator to draw the magnetic field through the stator windings more efficiently, as well as adding the additional magnets. You could also just put a steel water on the back side of the stator, but you'll get some eddy currents being made inside the washer.
If you add some small holes near the center shaft of the rotor, the rotor should act like a centrifugal compressor and increase the air flow between the rotor and stator. Increasing cooling of the stator with force convection. Or, put the holes in the pcb stator near the shaft for the air to flow.
Core Outdoor Power developed these types of motors over a decade ago, I have one of their line trimmers, amazing power in such a tiny motor. No longer available it seems as they were bought by MTD which seems to have discontinued the motors.
Well done. Great idea. Maybe your high temperature issue can be improved by some design changes of the moving part to shape it more like a fan in order to push air to the pcb to cool it.
:1 Hello there, if i could give you some suggestions, you could try to improve your motor by laminating the iron. I know it seems to b something really hard, but there is already some silicon-iron or ferrite sheet in ali expres which are really thin, even more than that you could use the rotor itself with no magnets, since its made of iron however i suspect that if you do that you would get a lower speed because it would be working as an asynchronous machine. The lamination of the iron has to be parallel to magnetic field axe and it would help with efficiency.
Cool project, and I'm a bit late to the game ;) But, have you considered different ways of increasing / shaping flux in the motor? two possible thoughts: a) leverage vias and/or copper planes in the center of the coils to mimic a metal core b) use 2 PCB's to sandwich the rotor between to mimic radial flux motors
Your tenacity is commendable, the amount of iterations you've gone through on all these PCB coil projects is simply staggering to me, I usually give up after revision 3.
If theres a will, theres a way. And Carl has clearly shown that he has the will to make a PCB motor that works pretty well.
Make one mini fan cooler
@@timteecvhn it can give speed but no torque.. because of the coil limitations in that pcb..But it can be used in many places...but if you put a heavy proppler on it, the rpm will go down
@@b-beluga4510 maybe we can use some gears to increase torque
@@pratiklondhe5167 A harmonic drive, maybe?
Lots of good advice in the comments: hitting permanent magnets reduces their strength, use coolant when machining iron, a simple hand vice to put in the bearings would help prevent damaging the outer race,
True
Also the way he mounted the magnets in the steel part is shorting them, it would be better to have a magnetic plate as a flux carrier and sandwich the four holes on top made from pcb material so N-S of the magnets is not connected via magnetically conductive material.
@ Carl Bugeja & Robert F
You are conflating Iron and Steel, you should use coolant with STEEL, Iron is self lubricating because of its high carbon content which acts like graphite during the cutting process. In machine Iron, be prepared for a tremendous mess, the carbon dust will coat everything in a certain distance
One of the great things about online forums is that you can get a lot of good advice from people who have been there, done that. Recently, someone asked how to make a PCB motor and got a lot of great responses.
Some people suggested using permanent magnets, but others warned that hitting them with a machining bit reduces their strength. It's a good idea to use coolant when machining iron because it helps to keep the heat down and prevents the workpiece from warping.
also a good esc that keeps the motor pressing rather than jump around and hit the scale like that, not a diy arduino based one..
adding small air vanes to the side of your stater to encourage air movement though the PCB with holes in it might help control the thermals. A lot of high power motors use this design.
Good call!
To encourage air movement through the PCB with holes, small air vanes can be added to the sides of your stater. This will create a more efficient system by increasing the amount of air that is able to flow through the PCB. Additionally, this will also help cool the motor by drawing in cooler air from outside the enclosure.
Although I have absolutely no need for a PCB motor myself, it’s great to see your thinking process and seeing a solution evolve. Brilliant!
Thank you very much!
@@CarlBugeja ...Hammering bearings shouldn't be done. Try gently pressing them...Good job!!! 🇺🇸 😎👍☕
I like that you labelled the signal and ground and still got them mixed up. Seems like something I'd do tbh.
For calculating torque, you should instead make an inertial dynamometer. Basically a fly wheel that you attach to and spin up with the motor and monitor RPM, based on it's angular acceleration and the fly wheel's known polar moment of inertia, you can build a torque vs. speed curve that's much more accurate. Ideally this should be done using 2 fly wheels of different mass so that you can calibrate out the rotor's inertia, but if the rotor's inertia is much less than the flywheel or the accuracy needed is low, then this can be done with only 1
Great option, I was thinking the same thing! Was kinda flabbergasted that he said "the second method was less accurate", since the first method also takes in the acceleration by the gravitational forces. Basically the same thing as hitting one of those carnival attractions, the one where you strike with a hammer trying to make a bell go "Dingggg" (don't know the name) ;p.
Cool, is this method described further somewhere? Is it called something?
this is good - can't change the physics behind this simple test - very good!
I have worked a little with a company that is makes PCB motors commercially. The primary engineering challenge is heat removal, the method you are using is pretty much the way to do it. The next step is to add an aluminum housing as a much larger heatsink. The rotor is typically on both sides on the PCB. Two bearings further apart assists in removing wobble of the rotor. The next engineering challenge is that you get a very low copper to rotor ratio. One way to get around this is making a motor with a very large outer diameter, the other is to sandwich multiple together. By having a stack, you can utilize the same rotor magnet on both sides on a sandwiched PCB. From a power/efficiency compared to weight, these motors are not competitive with traditional wound motors, however I see a future for low cost designs where size and weight is not as critical. Using an extruded heatsink ring that mounts to the end would allow the assembly to easily scale up or down my increasing length with common componentry sandwiched together.
On your OtherMill -- you should use mist coolant and run at the right feed/speed with an HSS bit!
I think carbide will still do better with cast iron over HSS - HSS wants a lower SFM thus lower RPM during cutting or it tends to burn up. The Othermill doesn't spin slower than 10k- whereas I'd want to be cutting at less than half that RPM for a .125" endmill on a regular milling machine. Coolant could definitely help with the issue of burn up - spraying a bit of WD40 or a cutting lubricant can also work in a pinch.
You could make a little fan with that motor, they would be pretty useful in motherboards or small places that require coolig, great ideia m8
Hi Carl. If you extend the idea of decreasing magnetic reluctance from your iron rotor to the stator you could stick a tile of high frequency ferrite material to the opposite side of the stator. I reckon you should get significantly more torque that way. But since you then also increase PCB coil inductance you most likely will decrease the motor Kv value so you will the need a higher supply voltage to maintain max rpm.
Looking forward to your next improved motor!
Great work! Good idea to use printed fixtures. About the bearing: When journalling a shaft using deep groove radial ball bearings, you need to use two of them, not just one (unless it is a cross roller bearing, which is not available in such small sizes). In your case you could get away with stacking one on top of the other. This would get rid of that wobble and should improve performance as fluctuations in the air gap distance would be reduced. Also, it is best to press the magnets in; a convenient way is to use a small pillar drill.
a bit worried about whether the iron backplate has short-circuited some magnetic flux or not, because the magnets are sunk totally inside the backplate. maybe the holes should be shallower.
Right !
I think a "shoulder bolt" might do what you need for holding the bearing better
+1 for shoulder bolts, saved me from a lot of headaches when making some of my RC projects.
yep. and you cant always get the right shoulder length, but you can get one too long and tap it further without much trouble.
Or just a part threaded bolt, it'll be too long but you can just cut the excess threaded portion off.
@@spankeyfish yeah that’s the go to when the shoulder length is right. And the proper solution being AN or MIS bolts
I've heard that hitting magnets isn't the best idea; this may be for old-school magnets so possibly worthy of further investigation.
Maybe a vice or some other parallel compression method might improve things possibly?
No, still goes for exotic magnets. You reduce their strength. Those definitely need to be pressed in. The same with the bearing, but for different reasons. Ball bearings are designed to take a radial load, not an axial load. Hitting it in can deflect the cage and cause the rolling drag to increase.
Half tonne or tonne arbour presses aren't expensive, have plenty of feel and are designed for the job
KNIPEX PLIERS WRENCH makes a great hand held arbour press. especially for small parts like those.
True.
Magnets have been around for centuries and are still popular today. However, magnets may not be the best idea for making PCBs or motors. Magnets can be very strong and can easily damage or pull apart delicate parts. In addition, they can be difficult to remove if they are accidentally attached to a component. Magnets should only be used if there is no other way to hold a component in place.
This is a really cool project! I was excited to see another video in this series. Keep making progress
Cool project.
Kicad is the software that you want.
For real. KiCAD is free, open source *and* cross platform.
Meanwhile Altium is none of those, and costs 3,500€ *per year*. That's 15 Adobe licenses. Totally absurd. They must be running a good racket on whatever businesses pay for this.
At this moment, KICAD lacks on some features comparing to Altium, but the kicad developers make great improvements on each version. I have already used it in some professional projects.
More than 10 years ago Eagle was a promising tool, you had a Free Software version (even available in Ubuntu 2008 packages). But since about 2017, they changed their strategy, they were bought by Autodesk, and from version 4.7 to 9, they have not improved anything at all. They have only made an ANNUAL PAYMENT LICENSE with very annoying authentication system by smarthphone and time limited code. And continues without proper hierarchical design.
KiCAD instead has improved remarkably from version 3 to 5, has hierarchical design, trace length matching (this works very well, so this brings you the possibility to digital high speed design), and python scripting.
If Kicad continues to improve, we will soon have a tool capable of competing directly with Altium.
@@ralvarezb78 eagle is now integrated into Autodesk Fusion360
@@maxhouseman3129 yes, I know
@@maxhouseman3129 I have one fusion360 license at work
pcb drone? possible idea
Would be fragile, but awesome. 🤞
I mean, I have a small quadcopter that's basically a PCB with 4 motors on it. The main difference here would just be that the motors would be built in to the PCB itself.
Finally something amazing on UA-cam
Brilliant video. I love the determination. If you get the rotor recut, maybe look at making some curved channels on the back to act as a small low flow fan over the pcb.
Nice work sir! Keep this motor idea in mind. The number 1 killer of all motors is heat. When ever you can, find the best way dissipate heat.
Air flow will provide the cooling for sure. Your current changes will change the temp. Also as you found. Hint - Standard AC motors use their rotor (on an ODP motor) as the fan for air flow. Using both rotor and stator design, in harmony, you can create the optimum airflow you may need.
Great work. For the shaft/bearing setup, it is recommended to use a pair of ball bearings for supporting the shaft and the shaft could be a shoulder screw instead of a normal fully threaded screw. These changes should minimize the wobble you are seeing.
Great work! You can place thinner magnets (in hard plastic discs) on both sides of pcb for more efficiency.
Need transformer steel laminate. Also use cnc to make a fixture plate that mounts into the base plate. Cool stuff!🙂
Yep, sandwiched steel plates is the traditional way to avoid eddy currents in motors . A very traditional brushless design is to have a rotor made of stacked plates separated by oxidation, dipped in conductive aluminium to form shorted rotor windings that make the rotor respond to the 3 phase rotating magnetic field from the stator. Thus there are no permanent magnets and the rotor is formed from stacked plates cut/stamped into a designed shape, clamped and dipped.
I'm a very big fan of this project, you have my rapt attention, please continue
PCBWay doing great job sponsoring this video!
Mill vanes in the iron rotor that move air to cool the stator and rotor
A few more successes like this and you might be able to incorporate this design into a PCB quad-copter!
Imagine a quad where it's arms are the ESC and motors and they all connect into a central flight controller...
A quad where the whole thing can be made from a single etched PCB and some 3D printed props? Talk about driving the cost through the floor.
🤯🤯🤯
@@MurcuryEntertainment using a flexible pcb ...
A quad copter made completely out of one single PCB exists already.
@@maxhouseman3129 I was thinking a central brain that you could plug these arms into. Interchange them... Maybe even plug in other things.. sensors, wheels, whatever.. could be a terrific teaching tool.
very nice, can't wait for pcb robot v2 Thank you for sharing your nice work & ideas
If you slow down your feeds and also depth of cut , you can cut that with just superglue holding it to the table. I do it all the time
I will order my next project definitely from pcbway. Looks like a real cool sponsor and they do way more interesting pcb.
This rocks. Thorough explanation of your steps, great troubleshooting, friendly vibes, very cool engineering!
There are many new improvements with PCB Motor. For starters, the unboxing experience is much better. The initial testing yielded good results, and the iron rotor provides significantly more torque. Additionally, the shaft mount makes it much easier to install and use. Finally, the torque testing showed that this motor is extremely powerful. Overall, these new features make PCB Motor a much better product.
This is so awesome. You need to make the pcb press fit for a bearing and you need the magnet housing press fit for a shaft. Bonus points if you add a second pcb board that mounts to the first with another press fit bearing and mounting holes so you can mate this to a planetary (or other) gear box. That will allow this to easily drive your 2wd robot while getting more consistant readings/results. If this comes across as rude or intrusive I appologize.
Stators are made of a special iron alloy with silicon, silicon steel. The addition helps keep temperatures lower with changing magnetic fields, and helps the stator "drop" the field faster, for less hysteresis. I have a few plates left. I originally sent to oshcut for some custom stator lamination. They were interested in attempting the material
what is the alloy called? where can I buy it / get it machined?
@@gedr7664 its called Silicon steel..
This is a very important invention. combined with 3d printers and PCB milling machines you can create A LOT!
This is exactly what I’ve been looking for FOR YEARS
The "real" temperature test is quite hard to do in a home lab.... Ideally you want to measure the motor structure heat - per watt of mechanical energy delivered. For steady state RPM's this is only really doable if you have a reference motor bench with constant load RPM and a torque meter on the coupling shaft.
Good work, really interesting to see :)
Mechanics usually heat the housing and cool down the bearings when they need a thight fit. It makes it much easier to mount
awesome project!
I think there could be another reason, why temps improve with higher speeds: the faster magnets move over the coils, the more they themselfs will actually induce a voltage, opposing the driving voltage. that will result in lower currents, and is usually the reason why typical electric motors have the highest torque at start up (higher current- stronger magnetic field - more torque). you could easily test that by measuring the amps drawn at different speeds.
If you want a better rotor, you could cast one out of ferrite epoxy. With a 3D printed mould. No eddy currents, and even higher permeability.
That's a great idea
Next time you can use a machinist trick. Glue it onto some stock with super glue and then use heat to release the blank when you are done milling.
JohnnyQ90 does this a lot for small parts that are difficult to hold.
You need magnetic chuck for such devours. Or you need to have custom designed work holding, soft jaw vice.
I think you could further increase the torque by building a rotor with magnets on either side of the PCB. Besides the additional flux from the added magnets such a arrangement is likely decreasing flux leakage by a lot
I was thinking about if this was possible - great job
You guys are really good and smart. Im very impressed. Keep going. Success to you.
A cool project idea for these struck me today - a quad copter.
If you could write custom controller code for a small microcontroller and add a battery, you might be able to have a quad copter milled and assembled and sent to you save for the propellers.
PCBs are pretty lightweight but also decently strong, so being able to just order some quad copter a cheaply from a PCB mill would be pretty cool.
Heck, maybe the military could put electronically-activated explosives on them and get a cheap source of controllable missiles lol
Love your approach for testing. Excited for the next 2-wheel drive robot video!
You are the real deal my guy.
How about an iron heasink at the back? Would improve thermal issues, but also increase magnetic field strength and improve torque.
The magnets will probably attract to the iron heatsink and based on why previous test I think the coil's magnetic field wouldn't be strong enough to overcome that attraction and rotate the rotor
@@CarlBugeja Didn't PCB way just release an aluminum PCB substrate? Would love to see the motor on that. It would, in effect, have a built in heatsink. Right?
@@Scott_C aluminium will still react to eddy currents
@@zoeyk.6338 true, however the thermal performance may be worth it for the dip in efficiency.
@@Scott_C quite possibly, perhaps one could design the rotor such that it has a fan coupled/built into it, in the name of reducing part count.
Like the shaft passes through the pcb to drive a small fan on the back etc.
This is absolutely awesome. I bet if you glued small ingots behind the PCB at the center of each coil you'll increase the torque significantly. If you can get thin slivers of iron in 0.1-0.3mm thicknesses and you sandwich the slivers with some spray paint as the dielectric you'll cut out a lot of the Eddy currents.
I kept on thinking "Where do I know this guy's face from"and then suddenly realised: You are the real life Mr Robot! (Quite literally)
Those motors would be a great upgrade for people who have models of the TOS Enterprise. The could use them for the rotating bussard lighting on the front of the nacelles. The motors which are being used at the moment are very loud. The rotating engine lights of the TOS Jupiter 2 also pops to mind. I am sure there are other model kits which use conventional motors for lighting effects. It's something to think about.
Finally a upload after 2 months
This may be the best channel on UA-cam.
^
See that? That's a period. As in, "This may be the best channel on UA-cam PERIOD!"
Why don't you use a powerful magnets on the other side to keep the iron stable while drilling.
Good job. Thank you for sharing your innovations with us
I'm loving all these mechanical PCB designs. Keep up the good work.
Your effort is appreciable..
I had no idea a pcb axial motor was possible! This is great!
Although I did not understand anything
Because it's not my place
but i enjoyed
Thanks
And you are a person with great patience
Deal with problems calmly
Try PCBs on both sides of rotor, will streighten field where is interacts with the rotor.
One word incredible
As always high quality content ❤️👌
You should create a tiny wave (harmonic) reducer to fit on your motor. It will give huge torque
Use super glue to hold the parts you want to machine, at end try breaking the glue bond or dissolve the glue. Never use double sided tape for small contact area parts.
Carl -- I admire your effort, but I think the iron you've added is not guiding the magnetic field very usefully. It would be better to stick with a plastic rotor (with magnets embedded in it), and do a better job guiding the motor coil flux to operate on those magnets. Assuming the board is laying flat, so Z axis is up, the mag fields of the magnets and the coils are parallel with the Z axis. But you're not providing a low-reluctance path for the mag fields from below the board and from above the rotor to curve around and complete the mag circuit. What I think you need is 6 "C"-shaped iron pieces that pick up the magnetic field below each coil and guide it around to above that same coil, so that you maximize the motor flux operating on the rotor magnets.
Sounds right, the rotor magnets are poled through their thickness, the steel reaches both flat faces so they likely steal flux by routing it away from the exposed faces. An air gap around the magnets might be a better idea. The field coils have no help at all, maybe some ferrite C cores can be used but even a big ferrite washer might be better. Trick to visual use magnetic fields, wonder if there’s some cad for that.
You really deserve these sponsors !
Next step is manufacturing custom shape and magnetic field rotor so it is own housing and magnet, while shape allowing air to blow trough it, also holes in PCB for air to be able to blow trough it.
Amazing innovation and engineering skills.
Great engineering / trial and error 😎
your pcb motor are great use to increase the efficiency of designing a wind turbine. i hope you are interested with wind turbine
I'd recommend to set up design rules in Altium Designer to avoid silly mistakes in future.
Design rule check really helps to find either undesired net connections or layout that goes beyond manufacturer's capabilities.
You could add a small 3d printed fin structure to the PCB-facing side of the rotor which acts as a small ventilator for cooling the PCB actively.
LOVE the way you design PCB's brilliant artist you are Carl!
If you are using Altium Designer to design PCBs, it would be interesting to make a series of videos to teach how to use the software. Something fast and intuitive, nothing like the most videos that are out there on the internet/youtube...
1) PCB design process (from schematic to pcb and design considerations)
2) Draw schematic
3) Import schematic to PCB
4) Layers and grlound plane
5) Create my own components
etc ...
Great video btw :)
very very impressive research.
You STILL have not completed the magnetic circuit through the stator. You can DRAMATICALLY increase your torque by putting a second rotor on the other side of the stator to draw the magnetic field through the stator windings more efficiently, as well as adding the additional magnets. You could also just put a steel water on the back side of the stator, but you'll get some eddy currents being made inside the washer.
Iron disk under the coils
Iron stator
And multiple thin PCBs stacked but with thicker copper if that's possible
Very nice new version! If you ever need some dynamic balancing of rotors, I've got the machine.
Superb 👌.
Hats off for you patience while creating these projects
Cool little project
Amazing work.
If you add some small holes near the center shaft of the rotor, the rotor should act like a centrifugal compressor and increase the air flow between the rotor and stator. Increasing cooling of the stator with force convection. Or, put the holes in the pcb stator near the shaft for the air to flow.
Core Outdoor Power developed these types of motors over a decade ago, I have one of their line trimmers, amazing power in such a tiny motor. No longer available it seems as they were bought by MTD which seems to have discontinued the motors.
This is so cool 😎 One of my favorite projects!
for iron milling, you could make a support with the aluminum to hold it!
Well done. Great idea. Maybe your high temperature issue can be improved by some design changes of the moving part to shape it more like a fan in order to push air to the pcb to cool it.
:1 Hello there, if i could give you some suggestions, you could try to improve your motor by laminating the iron. I know it seems to b something really hard, but there is already some silicon-iron or ferrite sheet in ali expres which are really thin, even more than that you could use the rotor itself with no magnets, since its made of iron however i suspect that if you do that you would get a lower speed because it would be working as an asynchronous machine. The lamination of the iron has to be parallel to magnetic field axe and it would help with efficiency.
hi could you please help me find those thin sheets from aliexpress? could you please give me a link? I can't seem to find it
Cool project, and I'm a bit late to the game ;)
But, have you considered different ways of increasing / shaping flux in the motor? two possible thoughts:
a) leverage vias and/or copper planes in the center of the coils to mimic a metal core
b) use 2 PCB's to sandwich the rotor between to mimic radial flux motors
Can you try having a rotor with fan like shape to aid in cooling a little bit.
You really did hardwork brother 👏
Oooohh maybe you could add in a "thrust" metric! Bolt on propellers from 1" to 7" are cheap and easy to get your hands on. Might be a fun add on test!
I just discovered your channel, and you're amazing
This was cool to watch
Check out JLCPCB, they now offer aluminium PCBs for better heat dissipation, the same type as used in strong LED lights.
Your videos are amazing 😍
Keep going
One of the most underrated youtubers. Love your content. Keep up the amazing work. :)
Lovely Dude. Dark Circle Development's on track.1
Install small fan powered by shaft on opposite side. This will make motor more efficent.
Mill an aluminum holder for the iron instead of a 3d printed one to be able to mill the iron rotor