motors in the UK

Hello,

Any one know of a decent motor supplier for brushless dc motors of sub 1KW (maybe 600W) and 48ish volts. I have some old telecom psu that kick out 48V hence the voltage requirement without additional circuitry shennanigans.

I have looked at the anheim automation bldc motors that look in the right price range around £100 per motor. I contacted them but they have yet to reply. I have googled until my fingers are numb but no where I can see I can put in a credit card and hit go or gives an idea of pricing or if they will deal with someone requiring less than a pallet load of.

I have ordered a 1KW DC motor to drive the spindle from technobots. I didnt seem to think the bosch 750 or other technobots motors would be greatly suitable to behave as servos. I have some omron encoders which are great. Plan on tacking them on the end of ?? motor to form closed loop.

I'm liking dc motors for my ability to build controllers for them and doing a controller for a BLDC doesnt look to bad. AC servos and 80V-100V+ dc servos look way out of my price range £250-£silly. Need a pretty hefty motor for Z axis (1800 oz in stepper) stalls a fair bit when pushed into the more than 40ipm turf. Still the head on the RF45 square colum isn't that light! A brake as an option would be good for the Z as I intend to remove the acme screws and replace with ball screws at some point.

Anyone any tips for a helpful reasonable priced ,UK, ( ie non exorbatant shipping) DC brushed or preferably brushless motor supplier? Or am i trawling ebay for a good while in hope?

Best Regards,

Simon

Come on people someone must know a place they can suggest to help simon out?

Ill do some digging myself but cant promise anything simon.

Thanks for the rallying call ;).

Im not suprised no one has replied. It was quite a vain hope but worth a go.

If you want stepper motors you have quite a choice. There is motioncontrolproducts.com , ebay, arc euro trade etc etc. If you want brushed dc motors for very small stuff there are plenty. Larger ,brushed, motors to be found at technobots and other robowars / robotics sites. Ac induction motors can be bought from chronos and clarke i think. Brushless motors avalable on ebay but for RC helicopters and the like. The rare earth magmotors quote 1-2Kw of power in very small packages but are £200+. Also don't think (maybe wrongly) they'd really be suitable for servo work and £265 is an expensive test.

But when it comes to brushless motors for cnc work its either get very lucky on ebay or fork out multiple hundreds for one motor. eek

Well at least thats what i have managed to turn up ;)

anaheim have responded and are pricing up a quote for me, so good news, but i fear the shipping for 3 lots of heavy motors may kill me off!

The 1000W dc motor from technobots arrived today and I am going to give it a try as a spindle motor. For £68 + shipping its not that costly a mistake if it fails. Going to try the motor straight to the PSU with the psu volts dialled down and build a pwm H-bridge later. or maybe buy off ebay if i see one i think would do at the sort of price that wins the buy/make argument.

However the BLDC stuff may hurt a little more but I'm pretty confident I can build a controller. ( pride and fall maybe !) Think it will take 2-3 months to do the electronics and software. Could buy controller for BLDC but run at $158 + hefty shipping for one plus I like the challange of building the contoller. We'll see.

I managed to get the quadrature encoder working with the dspic and a omron encoder. I tied this up with the other bits of software I have been scribbling into the compiler . eg genrating a pulse train based on number of steps orders via rs-232 and it all seems to work pretty well.

When the bldc arrive I will have to build three half bridges and code up the pwm an hall position sensing and i "should" have a controller. Couple that with the pc front end I can jog a stepper and make it move 0.001,0.01,0.1,1,10 reliably under the load of the mill head.

But it is all strung together with bits of string and needs much more work. I have enclosed a picture so you can see just how prototype the prototype is!

So I should be busy then!

Enough from me and thanks again for the post.

Rgds.,

Simon

hehe, this is all abit aboce me si. I read everything you said and i kinda know what yours talking about but names and references are no more then just that sorry mate.

I looked at the pic but again all i can think of is "Spag-Bog" lol, i'v asked Dom from ukrobotices.com to have a read of this post as he used to do robotwars and so on so hopfuly hell have some choices for yo.

Kind Regards,
CheekieMonkies

dom, cheeckie monkeys.

Thanks for the replies.

I thought I was on the "outer edge" a bit ;)

thanks dom for confirming my suspicions re bosh motors.

Spag-bol eh? he lol yep I can see that. Still board v2 is designed , the layout is in top left of the piccy. so hopefully spag bol shouid turn into maybe only crows nest.

;)

I'll let you know how the motors and controller turn out over the next x months.

Please do look forward to it, build logs would be good we can add a fourm for that to.

I thought I'd keep posting every now and again, although this stuff is cnc electronics rather than ballscres and the like just yet.

Enclosed a pic of board v2 at the top of the picture which has quadrature, pwm output, and lcd input. Much less messy than board one and more glitch free.
Board three will be sans 5v regulator circuitry . Thats because i've build the PSU board (bottom of picture ) to provide regulated 5v for uprocs and 15v to power the pwm board thats in the works.

heatsinks on the psu board not too necessary now but were with the damaged 15v and 5v regulator i had on the board. switching reg rather than linear are used. heat dissaption with linear regs was troublesome and frankly i just wondered whether the switching reg ic were useable. and they are. fried two of them when i put the diodes in the wrong way around. ooops. i didn't know i had until i realised how hot they got. hence heatsinks. then replaced with new regs and the heatsinks dont seem to be necessary. But cant hurt especially under hihger loading than i have tested with.

pwm board will be used for driving 1000w dc motor thats going to be the spindle motor for the cnc mill. h bridge with ir2110 uder microp control. hefty heatsinks and mosfets. with temp sensing and current measurement fed to microp. No small order. especially dealing with limit volatge spikes due to inductance and motors etc.

anaheim automation are supplying 3 nema 48v ~600W BLDC motors so I'll be building a controller for them at some stage.

Again yep, might be easier to buy controllers but i did want to make them.


Rgds.,

Simon

looking good, v2 dose look alot nice. Did you solder all the tracks yourself? I think tracks is the right word ?!?

yep,

i design and make the boards from scratch. You can tell this because they dont have the solder resist coating or a silksreen on them. The solder resist generally being the green colour you associate with professional circuit boards. the silkscreen being the writing detailing component layout.

Still i like the fact i can knock up a board from scratch in an hour or two if i have the need.

yep tracks is the word.

plenty of info on the web about making own pcb's. for simple stuff it really easy. But for other stuff there is a myriad of things to watch out for in the design.

i have a reasonable setup and can get to .5mm track widths ok. surface mount doable too.

plenty of manufacturers out there will make pcb and post to you if you send them design. depends on what you want. just search on pcb in google or ebay and click the myriad of links.

Rgds.,

Simon

Nice work simon, ill be in contact with you soon about somthing i have an idea about.

You could always try us, we have 500W motors for about £100, we also have drivers as well.

Well its been some time and several board revisions but I am getting there now with a brushed DC motor controller. Its going to control my 1Kw 36V motor for mill spindle. Had lots of fun with IR2110, HIP4081 and transient problems. As well as double sided PCB prototyping. Finally got a working controller a couple of weeks ago. It will control anything up to around 50V and up to a couple of KW. Have tested so far up to about 1KW.

PWM works well and will brake and reverse nicely. RPM sensing via quadrature works nicely too.

Now just to add cycle by cycle current control, thermal sensing, torque control and I2C for controlling it an I'll be done. Well apart from the next version powering the 12V and 5v part of the circuit from the motor supply ;).

Having some fun with Analog to digital sensing for current control at the moment.

Well here what Mk3 look like. Will post again when next revisions looking ok.

Simon

Any updates on this Simon ? what happened to the "MK3" ?