Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

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peridot
 
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Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by peridot »

The difference between a brushless DC motor and a stepper motor has never been very clear to me; it seems like they're each a set of windings around a ring of magnets. The physical design is presumably somewhat different, but it makes me wonder: can the motor shield be used to drive a brushless DC motor? For example, I have a number salvaged from dead hard drives that have four wires, one common wire and one at the other end of each of three windings ("wye configuration").

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

Driving a brushless motor is similar to driving a stepper. Most have hall-effect sensors for feedback on rotational position/speed. Not sure what feedback (if any) is used in hard-drive motors.

A while back, someone posted that he had success doing this. But I don't recall the details.

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peridot
 
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Re: Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by peridot »

Among the ones I've opened, hard drive motors have no sensors (back EMF sensing? dead-reckoning? feedback via the read head?), but CD-ROM and floppy drive main motors do have Hall effect sensors. I was thinking of the simplest case, just commanding a speed and trusting the motor to catch up. I'll look through the archives, thanks.

For posterity, as it were: http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.ph ... 83&p=67065

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adafruit_support_mike
 
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Re: Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by adafruit_support_mike »

peridot wrote:The difference between a brushless DC motor and a stepper motor has never been very clear to me; it seems like they're each a set of windings around a ring of magnets.
Technically, steppers are a sub-category of brushless motors. The only difference I've seen is that 'stepper' usually means the coils are outside the rotor, and 'brushless' means the coils are inside the rotor.

Steppers also tend to be 'reluctance motors', which have a rotor that looks like a gear. When a coil has current flowing through it, it pulls the nearest tooth closer. Brushless DC motors tend to use a magnetic strip for the rotor.

The control process should be pretty much the same though.

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armohseni
 
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Re: Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by armohseni »

HI
i have one question
i have many old VHS video BLDC.
how i can drive them with the v3 of the shield?
thank from advanced

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Can motor shield drive brushless DC motors?

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

We have not attempted that here and do not have any information on how to do it.

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