I was looking to purchase 4 of these Power Window Motors for an animatronic wing project but am a bit unsure of the board(s) and batteries I would need for them? I see the frequently bought together boards on the same page but don’t know if those would be suitable for 4 of these motors? Should I look into LiPo batteries or AA batteries? Can I just buy four of the “Right,” motors or do I need to get the “Left,” side motors appropriately?
Hi,
Here are answers to your questions and comments:
The first step would be to check the motor’s specifications. You can find that on the product page, below the recommended products.
In this case, it specifies a “no load” current of < 5 A, a rated current under load of < 15 A and a stall current (locked) of < 28 A, all of this at 12 V DC.
Some of them may work. Considering the board can use up to 15 A under load (and a stall of 28 A!), we would recommend something like the RB-Cyt-133 to make your design safe. Of course, you would need one of these per motor. Anyway, you most likely want to control the motors independently of each other, so that would make sense.
The RB-Cyt-132 is also another good choice normally, but it is on the limit of what is acceptable for these motors (limit of 13 A continuous, motor says it needs < 15 A). Therefore, this may work, but it really depends on how uch load you place your motor under. At large loads, it will probably use more than 13 A and this motor driver will not be acceptable at that point.
You definitely should not be running this off AA unless you want to use a LARGE amount of them. These are high current motors (5-28 A!) and at 12 V Dc, this would mean you would need 8 AA x whatever current rating your cells have. If you draw too much current from AA batteries, they can heat up and burn/explode/cause fires, etc. (well, like any batteries, really). You can read more about AA and maximum current draw here. At 1.0 A continuous per block of 8xAA (batteries in series to produce 12 V DC), this means you would need 8x28 AA (each 12 V pack in parallel) to be on the safe side. That is 224 AA batteries and is probably not very cost effective.
For batteries, you’ll need something that can produce up-to 15 A x4 = 60 A of current @ ~12 V DC. This will mean a beefy battery pack; not just for total discharge rate but also for capacity, since you most likely want it to last more than a few minutes! For example, if using something like the RB-Sta-02 LiPo battery pack (3S/11.1 V DC, 3500 mAh charge, 30C discharge), the expected duration of use if using ~60A would be a few minutes. The best idea would be to get one motor, motor controller and battery pack and try it out and see how much it uses in your setup. If it uses close to its maximum rated current, you may then want to have more than one battery pack in parallel (maybe one per motor controller?).
The left and right side motors simply are reversed from each other. This is only really important in a case like a car, where door assembly is mirrored on one axis but otherwise near-identical. If you are making your own custom setup for animatronics, the “car side” orientation of the motor/gear assembly does not really matter. Just make your setup matches the product you purchase!
Sincerely,
Wow that is a lot of AA batteries, good thing I asked here first! I was unaware that these motors pulled so many amps, I will certainly try and find a beefy enough battery pack as I would certainly prefer to be able to use the animatronic as long as possible (cosplay). That battery equation is for one battery if I’m reading it correctly? If I bought multiple batteries for each motor then would that extend the duration and capacity? Thank you for clarifying the left and right orientation it was a bit confusing. One last thing I was wondering was what the shaft size was on these motors? It appears to be 10mm according to the diagram and I was hoping to buy the appropriate sized shaft and bearing from your site to put it in a actobotics channel.
Hi,
Indeed. Of course, you could always use more batteries! 
The amount recommended by that calculation is based on the average AA’s safe output of current. @224 AA you may get ~25-30 minutes of power with the average cell if everything was running at full power the entire time.
Indeed, they use what would be a surprising amount when compared to small electronics. The thing is, car alternators produce huge amounts of current, typically above 100 A for modern cars. Therefore, in a car setting, these motors are quite appropriate.
Don’t forget that the calculations shown were based on full load current of all 4 motors continuously.
Yes it was. Of course, depending on your setup, the motor may use far less than 15 A. It really depends on how much load you have on them. One thing that is certain is that they will most likely use more than 5 A under load.
Yes, it most certainly would. You can easily connect each motor driver to its own battery pack and just have a common GND between all electronics (motor drivers and microcontroller(s) ).
According to the drawing found under Useful Links, the diameter does seem to be 10 mm.
Sincerely,