BLDC Gimbal Motor Selection

[Jim Anastassiou]

Called a few suppliers and they advised to stay away from rebranded motors. T-motors (RC Tiger) has major global distribution and is a renowned brand in the RC industry. They have a solid line of Gimbal motors and a supplier called RobotShop in Mirabel, Quebec. I have contacted their tech support and awaiting a response to aid in motor selection for our application and to provide more specs. They also carry a huge inventory and shipping to the lab would take a max of two days.

Jim.

[Jim Anastassiou]

Here is the e-mail I received from robotshop:

Hi Jim,

Thank you for contacting RobotShop / Lynxmotion. When we embarked on creating Lynxmotion UAV and choosing brushless motors, we also looked for very high quality, reliability and excellent service, and after research and testing have been very happy with T-Motor and their products. Although we do not carry all of their products, we can certainly special order almost everything they carry, and if we get enough requests, we list them and stock them normally.

With regard to the specific series of motors you are interested in, we have not used those ourselves, but can indicate that you will likely not have any issues with quality. Unlike their motors for use with multirotors, these do not seem to have a lot of information. Based on experience, the motors you selected are actually quite large and would be the type of motor used on a gimbal system which supported a DSLR. Notice how the GB54-1 is used on a handheld system:http://www.rctigermotor.com/html/2014/Announcement_0331/28.html

If you would like to be certain we would be happy to confirm with the manufacturer, but you really should not have any issues. If you'd like to proceed, we would need to provide you with an official quote which you could then approve. This would become an order, and we would order the parts specifically for you. We would need to create an account and would need your full contact details (address, telephone number etc), as well as the model number(s) and quantities of each which you'd like to have on the quote.

Regarding alternatives, we have discontinued a few suppliers of brushless motors and based on your requirements, T-Motor is likely the best option at this time.

Hope this helps,


Coleman
Technical Team - Équipe Technique
RobotShop inc.
Putting Robotics at Your Service!®
La Robotique à votre Service!®
Web: www.robotshop.com

I will get a price quote from them immediately on those two motors.

Jim 

[Tiberius Brastaviceanu]

Hi all, 

I was shopping with Ahmed for Broshless motor drivers today, this is what we found. 

Board options:

• RCTIMER 2-Axis Brushless Gimbal Controller & IMU v1.0;

• BaseCam (AlexMos) SimpleBGC (don’t know where to buy);

• V3 Brushless Gimbal Controller - 2 Axis (Genuine Martinez), or from RC man child

Martinez V3 board - wiring diagram

See how to Martinez Brushless Gimbal, very promising and well-documented.

Another lower cost alternative: Universal 2-axis Brushless Gimbal Controller Open Source V046 with Sensor, or see the same on Aliexpress, and on RCDroneHobby.

Other options have been proposed in the working document, HERE.

We need to make our choice soon.

[Tiberius Brastaviceanu]

Note that the motor driver comes with its own IMU. 

In the past, we have identified the 9DOF from Adafruits. 

Jim, could you enlighten us what is the difference and if we should go with the 9DOF? 

[Tiberius Brastaviceanu]

I looked with Ahmed at the code for the Martinez 2 axis motor driver, in the BruGi_050_r200.zip and we understood high level, how it is possible to disable the code for the driver's own IMU and insert code for the 9DOF, at the Arduino level, and how to insert code for the Raspberry PI. 

[Jim Anastassiou]

Those boards come with an IMU, a triple phase driver for each motor and a microcontroller programmed to work a certain way. If the firmware is open source we can modify it to do what we want. If it isn't then we are stuck with the hardware and writing firmware from scratch. Note if it is not an AVR Atmel MCU and its some other we will have a difficult time flashing it. If you DO find an open source solution go for it. We can try BOTH that and the custom solution chosen in Milestone 2 and decide what's better. 

[Jim Anastassiou]

My question though is how can we design this with a board that might not be on the market tomorrow? The architecture is pretty much standard. Its the same thing as the options we decided upon already, just in discreet parts.

[Ahmed AKL]

According to what we found here " code for the Martinez 2 axis motor driver, in the BruGi_050_r200.zip " I think we have access to the SW that controls the board. These  arduino sketches read the data from the IMU, send commands to the motors, and send data to serial monitor.

We can modify it to read the data from the 9DOF, and send commands to the motors.

Can you check this and see if I'm right