I saw an ad on eBay for a couple of windshield wiper motors - suggesting they would be good for robotic drive motors. Has anyone used these type motors ? Pros ? Cons ? Thanks !
- posted
18 years ago
I saw an ad on eBay for a couple of windshield wiper motors - suggesting they would be good for robotic drive motors. Has anyone used these type motors ? Pros ? Cons ? Thanks !
I bought a few at the local junkyard (car salvage) a few years ago for $10-$15 each. Prices may vary. Ebay might not be the best place to buy these; I imagine their weight makes shipping expensive.
Pros: High torque, durable design. Mine had a few terminals; you could use them to select different speeds. Run on standard 12v. Cheap.
Cons: Somewhat awkward lever arms. Moderately high current requirements. Rather slow since they're geared so heavily. Hard to get "standard" parts. No encoders. Used.
- Daniel
Most windshield wiper motors are pure crap for robotics. They're made to turn in one direction, and many exhibit a 20-25% speed loss in the other direction. They're loud and inefficient; neither problem is too critical for an automotive application, but important for mobile robotics.
But they're cheap.
-- Gordon
Thanks Gordon, just the kind of info I needed. I figured they would be slow, but had no idea about the reverse speed issue. Glad I haven't bought any yet!
P.S. Do you get any spam using your "NOSPAM" address? ( I'd like to switch to that form but I got hit so bad on some newsgroups a year ago that I am now gunshy. )
"Gord> >
My first robot used 12v windscreen motors and indeed the motors did run faster one way than the other. However I have another robot base which uses 24v windscreen motors and they appear to work fine in both directions. I don't know about their efficiency but they are powerful enough to move furniture, crash through walls and burn out the tyres if the robot base hits a wall without any stop button.
As for noise I liked them because compared with a high geared motor they make hardly any noise at all. The electronic control was too expensive however as they did use a lot of watts and the base had to be out of welded steel to hold the weight of the motors and batteries.
When I tried some light weight motors from a kids battery driven car the noise of the gears was horrendous. I was going to use a toy tank base as a cheap robot platform until I heard the noise and realised I and the wife would be driven mad with that thing moving around the house.
-- John
If in doubt, give spamgourmet.com a try. They've been reliable for the couple years I've used them. Only adds a delay of a couple minutes per email.
- Daniel
I used an unspammed address for so long it doesn't really matter, but I figured it can't hurt in trying to avoid even more. For a while I was getting upwards of 600 spams a day, from harvests of my e-mail on Web sites and on newsgroup postings. I still get >200/day.
-- Gordon
An alternative is car headlight motors, I used a couple I pulled from a Toyota Celica, worked great. They even have a knob on the shaft for raising the headlights manually if the motor failed. I attached a shaft encoder to this and got great feedback.
Don't what their duty cycle is like though, they might overheat if used really heavily.
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