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48 Comments

  1. Been trying t9 get my geo metro electric car going for years the motor controller 8s sophistited german unit. I built an electric scooter for scale,. 8 am going to create the mechaniçal module you built and try to make the scooter motor to spin. If that works I will make one of these modules only larger and try it on the three phase heavy duty motor on my ev, have much time and effort invested in it,. I-5 will be a miracle when I get her running again. Any suggestions on this will be appreciated

  2. Interesting idea. We could apply this for steppers, but timing would be for example 1/4 turn is 1 step, so we get simple manual precision control without any electronics.

  3. The real problem you will have was clearly visible when starting, the motor did not start immediately and jerked back and forth. In an electric vehicle the would be terrible. Also you have no load so although you say the motor synchronized with the commutator it was pretty rough and if it gets out of sync when load is applied it will stall and lock up or jerk about again. The true BLDC driver uses hall effect sensors or measurement of induced voltage to determine the most efficient commutation timing. Also the Bldc really only controls torque by means of PWM, and speed is a result of load vs torque. You might achieve some better results if you use an induction motor instead of BLDC.

  4. Not trying to argue or oppose your idea sir but what is the difference between this and brushed dc motor then? Any advantage over brushed dc motor?

  5. I'm not professional electrical person, but what I know and what I understand and what I can think of there has to be an analog way for bldc

  6. I save mosfets from anything and everything just to swap the ones from my controllers and testing for blown ones are as easy as testing diodes

  7. I didn´t see any regulation, and it barely moved. Modern silicon controllers can handle open-loop and closed-loop regulation with extreme efficiency and reliability, providing PWM sine wave for low speeds and CONTROLLED switching in the right moment at high speeds. If you tried to build a mechanical controller that way, it would be far more expensive than $400, and absolutely not reliable. And you really didn´t prove that your prototype is actually producing torque. I´s just an open loop switcher, so I assume it would just jerk around and not rotate at all with a load on it. If you put real high power on it, it would just spark the thing to hell, regarding the high resistance of the brushes and the contacts arcing. As you mentioned, you need experience in power electronics, mechanics, physics and electrical engineering to do it the right way. Not needing it is no guarantee for having a better solution. Sorry to say that, but there is too much wrong about this video that triggers an engineer.

  8. THUMBS UP (in caps of course), Robert.
    And Cheers and hats off…
    It's a fascinating delicacy.
    I've an obvious question….
    You say, your power supply isn't so "POWERful". Batteries are super powerful. And if I increase the ampere-age using a battery traction would it(the HULK motor!) deliver better?
    If the DC volt increased, could we rotate it faster and vice versa?
    Or is it related to the 230volt and thus the commutation ac motor responsible for the number(of RPM) game?
    So concisely, can I surmise it from an idealist perspective that the voltage produce torque and commutator-RPM the number of revolutions?

  9. 1 If you all haven't seen a documentary called….. It's worse than you think. . By revelations of Jesus Christ ministries…. I suggest you do….. all praise and glory to the most high Jesus Christ

  10. Right, that's a nice thought provoking video…. Get back to us when you actually drive a load with that setup.

  11. Thank you! I'm refitting my 4Runner with an electric motor, the ICE having seized after the oil pump failed. I'll be installing a 30hp to 50hp motor as funds become available. I'm looking at a similar control with mine, only a little different. As with the logarithmic dominos I'm controlling a big motor with smaller devices. I may encase my controller in sulpherhexafluoride…
    Oh I have a 5hp electronic controller and your conversion blends with that perfectly.

  12. Finally, a bloke that makes sense, this video saved my sanity, if I hear more "lost in flux" nonsense from some dummy i will totally lose it! Thank you so much for being an engineer-level technical man that knows how to communicate…. cheers! MarkMannM2

  13. I agree with you silicone is good for low power but controllers are stupid expensive and should use other methods that we can repair.

  14. This is more similar to a plug-in hybrid drivetrain such as the Prius synergy drive as it needs an external power train to turn at all than one that you can just connect a battery to and twist for a power delivery.

    A more effective way to make a non digital controller is to pair a potentiometer with plenty of mosfets and you got an analog controller which is my favorite alternative over the one that is popular in modern electric vehicles that we got now.

  15. I have been thinking of this for a while. I was thinking about using magnetic switches to control relays that would drive motor. Not sure this would save power, but I think it would be very robust. You could drive very large motors for very little cost and still have no brushes.

  16. do you have a detailed video of how you made this? I have been looking for a cheaper alternative for DC motor controls to help get people into EVs. Can you vary the brush timing easily on this and brush angle?

  17. I do admire your attempt to solve a valid problem. But I am confident you will have a lot of problems as soon as you put any reasonable power through the system. Lots of heating via resistive and arcing losses. You are trying to collapse a highly inductive load at high current and it will arc over at every commutation. DC motors don't do it for a different reason

  18. I guess this guy never heard of IGBT's. Where I work we have 500HP at 480 three phase VFD's to run our overhead gantry and trolly crane. No issues. This is even more complicated than using them as switches. This is using them as pulse width modulators simulating an ac signal.

  19. Must drills are brush less and have a long lifespan and get very hot

  20. so basically you can use low inexpensive brushless mottor with cheap esc (5 EUR of costs) with this mechanical controller – and voila you have electromechanical controller for big motors for cents 🙂

  21. As an electronics engineering, I love it, it's like going back in time. I can see a future where vehicles will be propelled by horses, again.

  22. Rob Sir This is a very great idea and congratulations on the Build of a mechanical controller for a BLDC motor, Kudos !! Rob Sir the standing questions remains in my mind are 2,
    1) We need to have a motor to drive the mech unit which will drive BLDC motor, what will control that motor ? or can it be a Diesel Electric design?!!
    2) do we need to rotate the controller to a desired RPM of motor ? How would it control RPM of BLDC?

    in the video I see you driving that unit with a electric hand drill I could see the RPM on motor was high the RPM on shaft of the converted alternator motor were much slow in comparison is it because of power supply or we need to drive the Mech unit at double speed to get desired RPM of the BLDC? Strange things in my mind but yes I admit they did trouble me a night !! Love and very warm regards from India Rob Sir!! Great Video!!

  23. Hi robert, great vid as usual, i went through this idea a while ago, i came up with a flat disc divided into quadrants(like a pie chart) but with a wide border to each quad, the dividing line remains a straight line but as you approach the edge of the disc, the relationship between contactor(ON) and the insulator strip(off) changes, the further out you go the more on time you get, but the off time always remains the same,, much like a pwm, still only a crude square wave generator, but variable (by sliding the contact further in or out on the disc surface), i was thinking of perhaps a solid coper disc with enamelled insulator strips. its much like the old distributor in an ignition system, the contacts in which can last a long time, although that is for high voltage not high amps.

  24. After having two dc to ac inverters for my solar setup explode on me I’m also going the rotary converter way. To bad if it’s less efficient, it’s repairable! When a silicon inverter dies it takes out all the electronics upstream in the inverter and downstream! By adding a flywheel the rotary converter can cope with capacitor start devices better than an electronic inverter!

  25. I agree that when you just want the darn thing to spin, brushes are better than fancy brushless controllers. Although it's not so much the power transistors that I dislike, but rather the microprocessor. It's basically a black box where you just have to hope it works, and if something goes wrong there's nothing you can do. I don't think there is any good analog solution for robotics where you need to move precisely from one position to another with smooth acceleration and deceleration, but for a car I'd much rather keep all the digital nonsense out of it. Electric cars should be a revolution of simplicity, but instead both manufacturers and buyers have gotten so used to complexity that they can't see the potential.

  26. What you built used to be called a motor/generator resolver. It was used in radar systems to accumulate azimuth sin/cosine values. It would seem it is necessary to reinvent the wheel as it were to accommodate what Tesla tried to tell us 100 years ago.

  27. This works for medium siced motors on simpel machines not on the realy big motors like Electric cars or similar i worked in manufacturin and testing of 300kW motor drivers and and now in convertig old delivery trucks to electric ones. If your phases of the driver are like 2 degres of or a coupel of amps out of sink the motor will begin to stutter an cause damage to the motor bearings and drivtrain not to speak of the pure block comutatin not even like hoppy level bldc drivers with trapezoidal comutation wich causes the motor to stutter even if everything is perfect

    Tldr ok for non critical stuff like something you build where a motor is needed but not for transportation or where a smoth runn is needed

  28. Really cool. I've been thinking for a long time how to mechanically switch on and off motor phases. I always liked carburetors over annoying electronic fuel injection. This is a great thing and I think it's possible to drive the commutation from the motor itself. Will need some kind of a kick start though maybe. Great stuff, thanks for sharing this.

  29. There was a very serious inventor from NZ that was making motor/ generators who when showed a "replication" of his machine that had FETs he told the guy 'stick to mechanical switching'…Robert Adams talking to JL Naudin

  30. The idea is flawed both in terms of the efficiency and motor feedback. When controlling a 3 phase motor under load you need to know what rotational state the motor is in, this can be done via back EMF detection, HALL sensors or any other kind of rotational sensor such that you know which phases to put your power across, if you don't know the state of rotation of your drive motor you can easily power the phases in the wrong order and produce enormous loads on the system in terms of amps and torque.

  31. Good work. I was introduced to the concept of phase-locked A/C motors as control systems while training as a technician in the 1970s. I seldom saw them working in the field. Often wondered why the idea was not applied to e.g. brushess or stepper motors. Really cool! Suggest that a small, motorcycle-equivalent, lead acid battery in circuit would make your converted alternator work quite well.

  32. Sorry Robert, I disagree. Silicon is used because it's maintenance free and because it's really quite cheap. That's why variable speed ac motor drives for industry use IGBTs that can handle thousands of amps, no brushes to wear, no carbon dust everywhere and no commutator to polish. This is why dc motors are no longer used. I see this idea as a giant leap into the past! But keep up the good work, I do enjoy your channel.

  33. I am over joyed with this. I have a use for it and need to gather the other parts but you will here from me again. Limited funds will slow me down but it will happen. Thank you so much.

  34. That's really interesting, you're right we just focus on electronically doing everything now. It has become a blind spot now. Nice bit of outside the box thinking!

  35. I can change my ESC's with an Arduino and C++ code with input either from a app or keyboard through the serial monitor man…

  36. I remember seeing a mechanical controller on a golf cart an basically it was a dial with a negative and a number of positive terminals at certain increments that went 12,24,36,48v to increase/decrease speed

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