Electronics - Motor repair success

I fixed my broken motor that is meant to power the auger via the tiny gearbox that will deliver the fish food in my demand fish feeder.

Normally I prefer less complicated sentences.

But I'm all excited.

It turns out, the problem was there were simply too many parts.

Or more accurately one too many parts, and one that was simply in the way.

The silver bit was the one too many. I think that broke off the bit where the wires connect, and fell into the motor, generally clagging things up.





The little nylon washer creates part of the front bearing, but it made getting the brushes back on impossible, because it had to be put on after the brushes. That's an impossible path through the plastic front. I don't have the kinds of quantum tools that walking through walls requires. And if I did, I wouldn't waste my time with motor repairs. I'd do much more interesting stuff, like poking my head through the fridge to see if the light really does go off when the door is closed.

So be leaving out those two small parts, I managed to make my motor work.

Only two parts.

And they were tiny.

Those that know me will realise that's a pretty low number of excess bits after a repair. I think I did quite well.

So well in fact, that it looks like this when it's running.

That should do nicely.

What this all means, is that there is really no reason why I cant put this thing together today, and actually finish something.

Maybe.








120 Things in 20 years - If I keep repairing them, one day an electronic motor repair might leave me with enough parts to eventually build another motor. I should fix cars.

Electronics - Aquaponics - Motor woes

I found out what was wrong with my motor.

I'll start that again.

I've been having trouble with my motor.

I opened it up and found what the problem is.

Too many parts inside just rattling around doing nothing.

I'm trying to explain to them that everyone has to pull their weight, otherwise nothing gets done.

So far they are ignoring me.



It's hard to fix something when you have no idea what it looked like before it was broken. Firstly, the bit of metal on the end of the yellow wire has to fit through a hole that's half the size of the bit of metal. But it did just fall out through that hole.

Clearly someone's being funny.

There are two bent bits or copper that look like they make contact with the shaft, but I cant see how they could without wearing out, But then, they are actually worn, or at least they look worn. but if there are magnets on the outside that don't have power going to them, and a rotating shaft with copper coils that gets it's power through these copper bits, why not just build the thing inside out, with the coils on the outside, stationary bit, and the fixed magnets on the inside. That way you would avoid the need to put power through a rotating shaft.

I must be missing something 



120 Things in 20 years - Electronic and Aquaponic motor woes, and much of the world, are confusing.

Electronics - Transistors

Transistors have to be one of the all time great inventions. Right up there with the sharpened stick, fire, deodorant on public transport, and the wheel.

Transistors are in just about everything electronic. They are what makes all that cool stuff like your computer work. They do it all day long, and there are sqillions of them.

That's pretty much all you need to know about them, but I'm going to tell you more anyway. Which is a little surprising because I don't really know a lot about them yet, but what I do know has opened some doors to a slightly better understanding of what's possible with this electronics stuff.

I made a program in my little chip that controls the speed of a little motor. The motor, and the chip were both powered by the chips power supply, but the chip cant control the motor directly. If you plugged the motor directly onto the chips pin, it would suck too much power though the chip and burn it out.

I actually did that, but oddly it was while I was trying to do the very thing that avoids putting all that power through the chip.

What I was doing was using a transistor.

This is the device here. The chip is on the board with all the short white wires on it. That plugs into the breadboard (white thing with holes for wires)

A transistor comes in various guises. The one I'm playing with is a small electronic component with three legs.

That small black thing on the right of the bread board is the transistor.


The other things in that picture of note are the motor on the left, and the two battery packs. One under the breadboard powering the chip, and the other at the bottom of the picture with two visible batteries. There should be four batteries in that pack, but I needed two of them to run my camera.

Doing 120 things in 20 years is teaching me new things all the time. Today I learnt that it's very difficult to take a photo of your camera's batteries.

The reason there are two battery packs, is because I'm powering my control circuit (the bit with the chip in it) with one of them, and I'm pretending the other is a 12 volt car battery. It isn't, but I have a good imagination.

The reason I'm pretending is because I want to learn how to power my motor from the battery (12 volt 200 amp hour deep cycle (great big (like a car battery but bigger))) I use in my aquaponics system as a back up power supply to keep the pumps working in case of a power outage.

I turns out if you apply a small voltage to a transistor's centre pin, and then pass a large voltage through the other two pins, you can use a transistor as a switch. Not so surprising really because that's what a transistor is. The small voltage to the centre pin allows a large voltage through the other pins.

Stop the small voltage and you stop the large voltage. Start the small voltage, and you start the large voltage.

Very clever, and very, very useful.

It's an amplifier.

It's also a digital switch.

I'm guessing it's some other stuff as well.

So far, transistors are my favourite component, except perhaps for chips. But I think chips are full of transistors, so they don't really count. In fact I think they're full of all kinds of stuff. Their real name is "Integrated circuits" or "IC's". I'm guessing there's a stack of stuff integrated into them.