Brushless motors

Let's talk a little about the edge of electric motors. A typical electric motor has a rotor, a stator, and brushes. The brushes transmit the electrical current to the rotor, thus spinning the motor. The drawback of the brushes is that they continuously rub on the commutator. As an analogy, imagine driving a car with the breaks partially pressed. That's what the brushes do to the motor. However, there is a solution!

Brushless motors, as the name implies, do not have any brushes. This means they are much more efficient, they last longer, and they are more powerful. But of course there is a drawback; they require complicated control. Luckily, brushless motors have found their way into the remote-controlled world and we can now find cheap and useful brushless motors and brushless motor controllers or Electronic Speed Control (ESC).

Getting ready

To make this recipe work, we will need a few basic things:

• An Arduino board connected to a computer via USB.

• An RC brushless motor, which...