PCB Motors Hack Chat

Carl Bugeja will be joining us in the Hack Chat to talk about making PCB Motors!

Hack Chat

Event Details

Carl Bugeja will be hosting the Hack Chat on Friday, August 10th, 2018 at noon PDT.

Time zones got you down? Here's a handy time converter!

Carl Bugeja is a 23-year old electronics engineer who is trying to design new robotics technology. Their PCB Motor design won the Open Hardware Design Challenge and will be going to the Finals of the Hackaday Prize. This open-source PCB motor is a smaller, cheaper, and easier to assemble micro-brushless motor.

What is unique about Carl's PCB motor design is that the stator is printed on a 4-layer PCB board. The six stator poles are spiral traces wound in a star configuration. Although these coils produce less torque compared to an iron core stator, the motor is still suitable for high-speed applications.

In this chat we will be discussing:
- Designing motors
- PCB applications beyond standard circuitry
- Building accessible robotics technology

Learn more about Carl's PCB Motor in the video and in their personal links below!

https://twitter.com/BugejaCarl

https://www.youtube.com/carlbugeja

https://www.instagram.com/bugeja.carl/

Event Logs

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PCB Motors Hack Chat Transcript
Stephen Tranovich • 08/10/2018 at 20:03 • 0 comments

Stephen Tranovich12:05 PM
Okay, let's get this chat started!

Arsenijs12:05 PM
Yay!

Stephen Tranovich12:05 PM
A big welcome to @Carl Bugeja for joining us on the chat today to talk about their PCB Motor designs!

Carl Bugeja12:05 PM
Thanks for having me

Stephen Tranovich12:05 PM
@Carl Bugeja , kick us off by telling us a little bit about yourself!

Carl Bugeja12:07 PM
So my name is Carl Bugeja. I'm a 23yr old electronics engineer, graduated from uni 2 yrs ago and since then i've been trying to build cool robots

Stephen Tranovich12:09 PM
Sounds like the dream to me.

Stephen Tranovich12:09 PM
Our first question comes from @Lutetium : Where did the inspiration for your PCB Motor design come from?

Carl Bugeja12:09 PM
I had this drone startup were we were trying to design a very tiny coaxial drone.. we have failed because we were trying to use off-the-shelve parts to integrate it into our drone.. after this i had come up with the brsuhless pcb motor concept were i was aiming to combine the prop, stator and electronics driver into one unit

Carl Bugeja12:10 PM
Haha i guess that answers the question

Stephen Tranovich12:11 PM
Hehahe It totally looked like you were the fastest typer on the planet!

Carl Bugeja12:11 PM
this is the drone

Carl Bugeja12:11 PM

Stephen Tranovich12:12 PM
Wow, awesome! I see the PCB Motor in there. Any videos of it flying?

Frank Buss12:13 PM
doesn't look like it can fly stable with only 2 rotors, e.g. the Tiny Whooper has 4

Carl Bugeja12:14 PM
this was actually before i came up with the idea of the pcb motor.. so this robot has an off-the-shelve brushless motor.. It had four tiny flaps that control the roll and pitch axes but that's were we failed as the flaps were too small to create a strong enough force to move the drone

Rebecca E. Skinner12:15 PM
You just very precisely identified the design problem, so isn't that fixable ?

Carl Bugeja12:16 PM
at that time we had given up.. this robot weight under 30 grams and it was very hard to go lower than that

Frank Buss12:16 PM
only one prop? the whole thing must spin like crazy :-)

ꝺeshipu12:16 PM
the duct has a second fan in it

ꝺeshipu12:17 PM
if you look closely

Carl Bugeja12:17 PM
no it has two props rotating in opp direction to control the yaw.. this is the pcb as you can see it is really packed and that dual brushless motor driver in the middle inspired me to try and design the pcb motor

Kris Winer12:17 PM
Are pcb motors more efficient than off-the-shelf brushless motors?

Carl Bugeja12:18 PM

Boian Mitov12:18 PM
the magnetic fields of the 2 solenoids will not interfere when they are so closely packed?

Boian Mitov12:19 PM
I mean on the PCB dial motor design

Carl Bugeja12:19 PM
my current prototype of the pcb motor is coreless so you cannot actually compare it with the off-the-shelved ones as they have an iron core.. so efficiency-wise it is not but it is much smaller and cheaper to assemble and manufacture

Stephen Tranovich12:20 PM
Where has the design of the PCB Motor left this tiny drone project?

Stephen Tranovich12:21 PM
And then we'll hop into some more community questions, because we have some juicy ones waiting.

Kris Winer12:21 PM
Please show us what a pcb motor looks like and describe how it works...

Stephen Tranovich12:21 PM
@Kris Winer here is the project page for the PCB motor: https://hackaday.io/project/39494-pcb-motor

Kris Winer12:22 PM
Thanks!

Stephen Tranovich12:22 PM
You're welcome!

Stephen Tranovich12:23 PM
Okay, the next question is by @Jarrett : Ever consider doing a multi-pcb stackup? Or aluminum substrate?

Danny FR joined the room.12:24 PM

Carl Bugeja12:24 PM
So in this startup drone project, i was not alone.. but i was responsible for the hardware design. After this drone project has ended, i started working alone on the pcb motor which is...
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