Tech Blog

The main complexity of BLDC motors is the need for specialised drivers to handle the electronic commutation, but is there actually a hidden advantage? BLDC motors have many plus points, including high endurance and a higher power-to-volume ratio than their brushed DC motor counterparts. However, some regard the need for additional drivers as a drawback - but with advanced driver ICs the user complexity is greatly reduced, and we can actually use them for relatively precise positioning control. Stepper motors are commonl…

N/L speed and Stall Torque on Motor Performance Graphs Our latest Application Bulletin covers a topic that our sales engineers are frequently covering with customers. In AB-032 we cover the the inter-dependent relationship between drive voltage, output speed and motor torque. You can read the full bulletin for an explanation of the fundamentals, but in the spirit of offering practical advice on our blog and monthly new letter, here is a section regarding what we can do to alter the motor performance to meet your …

At the end of last year, Doug wrote a blog post about the basics of reversing DC motors. Since a number of customers have asked us to advise about this recently, we expand upon this topic with some practical tips. If you’re not interested in the theory, skip to the end for our practical conclusions section. Are DC motors Reversible In short, yes. If you reverse the voltage to the motor, it will rotate in the opposite direction. The reasons for this are given in the earlier blog post ARE DC MOTORS REVERSIBLE ? But we n…

The Haptic Shield uses a 3.5mm audio jack We recently published a new tutorial for our Haptic Feedback Evaluation Kit that explores how to play music or other audio signals on a vibration motor or LRA. Using the great new "Audio-to-Vibe" feature in the DRV2605 and the 3.5mm audio socket on the Haptic Shield, you can easily experience meaningful vibrations alongside your audio output. This tutorial shows you how to access the feature in our Engineering Mode (and of course points you in the direction of the required f…

Looking to drive a DC vibration motor using an Arduino or Genuino? In this article you’ll find simple circuitry, suggestions on using PWM, and example code to download. Microcontrollers are used with virtually every vibration motor application. Whilst some industrial applications may want vibration motors to run continuously (where we would recommend a brushless vibration motor), in most cases vibrations are desired at specific times and for specific durations. As prices and size of chips have decreased, it has become incredibly simpl…

We’re back! A huge thank you to everyone for their patience whilst we temporarily paused our tech blog during our website update , and our sincere apologies to those who signed up during the break expecting to receive an email last month. As subscribers will notice, thing have moved around a little - but all of our content is still here! Our exciting news is that we are able to offer new types of content to help aid understanding and design of our parts. Our first two blog posts after the break immediately make use o…

The old Quick Vibe Estimator Along with our recent website update, we have had to redesign some of our previous content and tools. One of those items was the Quick Vibe Estimator which was formally in our blog post “Why is Vibration Amplitude in G?” Instead of creating a direct replacement, we decided to start a new single page resource which we can add to and update over time. So we are pleased to announce the release of our latest Application Bulletin : AB-031: Vibration Motor Calculators - ERMs and LR…

One of the first tutorials for our new Haptic Feedback Evaluation Kit covers enabling the ‘slider’ function on the kit. Enabling the slider ungroups the 9 capacitive touch segments on the bottom row One of the most visible changes to the Haptic Shield includes the new arrangement of capacitive touch buttons that act as navigation for the kit’s different Modes of Operation . Formerly, only 3 large buttons on the bottom row were used (left, right and select), but now there are 9 segments included. By def…

Around 5 years ago we started keeping a regular blog on our site. We thought it would be useful resource for customers, providing short articles that helped answer frequent questions or notifying people about our larger Application Bulletins. As more questions and comments about the articles on the blog came in, we wondered if people would like to have the content delivered straight to their inbox. So at the start of 2012 we sent our first email to a handful of subscribers, in truth we really didn’t know what to expect - miniature DC …

We are delighted to announce that our new revision of the Haptic Feedback Evaluation Kit is now available!  Some of the first units have already been shipped to those who signed up for our release email list, we now have more batches arriving and available for sale through our product catalogue or by purchase order. The Haptic Feedback Evaluation Kit You can order the kit, download the datasheet, and see pricing on the M20-200 product page . If you need a formal quotation for a PO,  please contact us here  or email …