After a bit of a hiatus, I’m back to building things, mostly from my previously-acquired stock of “spares”.
In particular, I have a pair of gearhead motors with integral magnetic encoder that I’m almost certain used to be sold by Lynxmotion, but that I can’t find any mention of on the site.
The label indicates that they are Hennkwell part number KG37F260-030E12, 200 RPM at 12 VDC.
The black cap at the base encloses a magnetic quadrature encoder, and the motors include a spare brass gear.
A quick bit of digging indicates that these have a 30:1 reduction on the gearbox.
Connecting the red and black encoder wires to 5VDC yields a nice pair of square waves on the green and white wires, corresponding to the drive motor’s shaft position. A quick examination yields 12 pulses per channel per revolution (maybe - there was a bit of uncertainty here), or about 360 pulses per channel per revolution of the gearhead’s output shaft.
All of this detective work is fine, but I was hoping to find an actual spec sheet on these units so that I had some actual numbers to go by, rather than the “that seems about right” figures I’ve come up with.
More importantly, I’d be curious to know why these motors are no longer stocked. Was there an issue with the supply, or were they pulled due to some sort of design issue that I need to watch out for while building with them?
Sorry if this info is provided elsewhere - I was unable to find any mention of these motors at all on the website, though I am almost certain that I bought them from Lynxmotion.
Yes we used to stock those motors. Their aren’t any issues with them I just had to scale back at the time cause there was too much going on. I do want to bring them back eventually. The spare gear is to replace the nylon one if desired. It will be louder using them though. If you avoid going full speed one way, then full speed in the opposite direction you should be fine. I found the spec sheet. KG37F260-030.pdf (83.6 KB)
That is a long, sad story.
The short form is that I am now out of the DC area, and am currently in northwestern South Carolina.
Robots took a sideline for a while, but I’m working on getting back into the hobby. Right now most of my gear is packed up in a storage unit, but I’ve been working out of a stash of “spares” I have available.
The most recent project has been a camera stand and motor drive for my time-lapse setup, built almost entirely out of what I had on-hand. I’ve got a quick tour of it here], and the first test-run output here]. It still needs a little bit of work, but as a first run of a work-in-progress, it isn’t too bad. The self-watering arrangement shown in the video tour didn’t work out too well, so I have an electronic metered pump system that I’m working on for the next run, which looks fairly promising.
Besides the automatic plants, I’m ramping up work on a long-stalled rover project. I will be using amateur radio for control, starting out with a fairly basic system - using DTMF tones sent from a handheld radio - but moving up to more complex systems in phases, eventually incorporating GPS navigation and live video and telemetry backhaul, also using ham radio gear. Just as the control system will start out with the basics and progress towards more advanced designs, so will the mobility system. I’ll be starting with a simple three-wheeled differential-drive-with-caster design just to get things rolling (ahem), but I’ve got lots of hardware to build a tracked unit with, and plenty of ideas as to how to implement it.
On the logic and programming end of things, I’m sort of in transition. The parts bin has a few BASIC Stamp and BASIC Atom modules, but when I was last building things, I was working my way into PIC microcontrollers. Unfortunately, after I shelled out for a programmer, boards, and the IDE, the company stopped supporting their PIC development tools, leaving me with a lot of time and money invested in a system that I can only use on one old computer that can still run the software. I’m not particularly thrilled about that.
These days, I have played around with the Arduino platform a bit, and I really like what they’ve done so far as making microcontroller programming easy and accessible to a lot of people. The standardized “shield” architecture is a great idea that has spawned a very large number of ready-to-use plugin modules available on the open market. I’m a bit perplexed about that “design error that became a standard” in the oddly-spaced headers on the digital side of the board, though. It’s easy enough to design into a PCB if you’re laying one out, but it requires some creative workarounds (or one of the 0.1"-compatible Arduino clones) if you’re trying to plug a perfboard with custom circuitry on top of it.
Currently, I am gravitating towards the straight AVR series of micros from Atmel, without the Arduino stuff on top of it. I’m still on the learning curve, but I like what I’m seeing so far as programming and capabilities are concerned.
Thanks for the spec sheet on the motors - that will come in handy very shortly, as I get some stuff put together for the early stages of the rover project.
The encoder is probably the same or similar to the current encoder being sold: lynxmotion.com/p-448-quadrat … cable.aspx
The assembly guide of the encoder shows it’s color coding…
