Hey! This thing is still a Work in Progress. Files, instructions, and other stuff might change!

OpenMotor

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Published on February 2, 2013

Description

I've always loved motors. I had the nutty idea to design an "open source" motor that could be printed and built using nothing more than magnet wire, some patience and a few off the shelf components like skate bearings and the like. I developed a parametric openscad script for designing the coil forms and structure of the motor, printed a few pieces then got pulled away. This is what I was able to complete. The idea was this was to be a simple 3 phase induction motor. The electronics required to drive it would be complicated, but the motor itself is dirt simple, 3 coils and a core. The SCAD script generates all the pieces.

Instructions

print 2 endplates and the forms. Wind the forms with magnet wire and place a solid electrically conductive (does not have to be magnetic) core within the forms, preferably with small shafts to support it on either side. If you dont want a working motor, you can also print the armature (add support for the bottom shaft) and you have all the pieces of the "open motor". There are also some blank winding forms under "motor.stl" for fun.

My hope is that someone will be inspired by this, and take it one more step : )

BTW, there was some gnarly math to get the endplates to look like that, intersecting circles at specific points and all that ... :D
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It might add a lot of "webars" to each wound segment if they can be filled with nails. There is iron in motors because just a coil produces a poorly performing magnetic field. Iron has the ability to soak up the magnetism from the coil which adds to the field of the coil.

Nice! Any link to a driver able to power such motor?

Sorry, no. I was going to build one since I don't know if there is anything easily available to drive this motor. A stepper driver might work. Maybe : )