another step toward a prinatble motor

Hi Everyone,

I have been working on a design for a useful motor that can be produced with a RepRap. Latest results are at:

[www.thingiverse.com]

It uses rare earth magnets, 3D printed plastic parts, and a PCB for the coil. I think it would be cool to incorporate the drive circuitry onto the PCB coil board, so you could make a functional motor with one reprapped PCB, and some printed plastic parts (and magnets of course!). That's the next step. Eventually it would be really cool to see printable motors driving printable sarrus linkages like this [www.thingiverse.com]
or printable linear rails like this [www.thingiverse.com]

Software for generating your own custom coil patterns is available at the thingiverse post above. If there is interest I can put up a tutorial on the reprap wiki for how to adjust the design parameters and make your own coils.

looks very nice!
Not that the motor would need it, but if ever needed I suspect you could add torq very easily by doubling the rotor section (with magnets)?

What's the average costprice for this?

This design costs a lot more than a stepper motor, but a different choice of components could probably reduce the cost quite a bit. The magnets alone are about 25.00 USD (part number 469-1004-ND from digikey). Components for the drive electronics are 37.00 USD which could certainly be reduced. And about 45.00 USD for the printed circuit board (from a place like batchpcb). So, $62 if you can fab your own pcb, $107 if you need to buy the pcb too. And of course there are the printed plastic parts, but we can make those for almost free, right?

And yes, the rotors can be stacked up to increase torque.