Motorised Nautilus Gears #2 by Alzibiff

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is the second of two attempts at motorising MishaT's Nautilus gear set. In the past, I have used a rather expensive although very solid, geared DC motor for projects like this but have never had a go at 'hacking' a servo motor to achieve the same thing - low RPM, low voltage and a decent amount of torque.
The main difference between this motorised gear set and the first one which I made, http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:176570 is that here, only one gear moves around - it rotates along with its curved connecting bar around a fixed gear.
The problem with using a servo motor of course, as well as doing the hacking, is that there is no immediately obvious way of hooking up the drive shaft to turn an axle. This requires some creative thinking which is why this project is still "work in progress" - there will be better ways of coupling the motor to the M3 axle bolt which I have used no doubt so the challenge is on!
The motor is run from a standard 1.5V battery as shown in the video. http://youtu.be/qZQpdfoXxdA It is not quiet so maybe enclosing this thing in a box would be a good idea. (Please excuse the quality of the video - I will turn the radio off next time).
The choice of servo by the way was quite arbitrary - it was one of two spares I had in my work box, having used one of a packet of three for an Eggbot derivative over the summer.