Hububububble Motor

The next logical step for any piece of technology is to make it lighter, more powerful, and smaller. These goals I hope to find in the first actual hub motor I will be building.

Don;t get me wrong, I have built my own brushless motors before. In fact, if anyone recalls the first Attrition, it had a custom built 40mm motor to internally spin the drum. Now it is time to build yet another motor, slimmer, larger in diameter, and torquier (new word or sp?).

First round will be a test platform. I have a bunch of ideas on improving the sea of hub motor designs but those will be applied once I can prove to myself that I can produce one basic device.



Borrowing the techniques of Shane Colton and Charles Guan, this motor will have the following characteristics:

1. Flux ring is composed of waterjet stacked laminations. It will feature internal grooves to make magnet housing easier.
   
2. Stator hub is a single piece turned aluminum round. It will have milled flats on both ends to facilitate the exit of motor and sensor wires.
   
3. The motor will have three hall effect sensors to interface with the controller
4. Motor will be wound 30-turns per tooth, dLRK for space savings
5. 5" OD, 1.5" wide
6. 70mm x 16mm Hitachi Stator
   

Where did I get these numbers from? Charles wrote up a neat instructable with will teach you motor building basics and some sample calculations for rough estimates. Very useful and highly recommended.

Instead of featuring threads to grip a tire, I will be using a "keyway" integrated into the flux ring.



In actuality, it is an extension of the through holes used to bolt the entire motor together. I sunk in the material where there were no screws, and left the extrusions as mechanical "grips" to grooves I will be adding to the inner diameter of the cored out 5" wheel. Forces are in the correct direction, I dont expect anything pushing the motor horizontally, this should work. The number of screws might change depending on how unsafe I feel about the sheer forces on 6-32 screws.


The pile of parts has already begun. McMaster-Carr arrived today, so I received two 30A durometer 5" wheels, three 1/2" bore ball bearings, and 2mm roll pins. I already salvaged the stator from an earlier grab, and the magnet wire recycled from previous orders. The bag of 6-32 flat screws came from Cake, where I ordered a bag of 50 only to use 2. Gotta love bulk buys.

The remainder of the parts should be coming in throughout the week/weekend. Speedy Metals is expected to arrive tomorrow, which means I can begin waterjet cutting the flux rings granted the machine is not broken (oh no my baby!). I suppose then it is possible to have a rotating wheel by Saturday morning. The Applied Magnetics order is projected to arrive Monday, but gluing magnets was never a time consuming issue since it is just adding glue. I don't need to be watching the grass to know that is growing.

For the time being, project name sits at "Power Drive", or "p0w3r Drive" if you are feeling creative.