From Mike Szczys on the Hackaday blog:

Designing Tiny Motors Right Into The Robot’s Circuit Board

 

Motors are not overly complex, but this one is downright simple. Carl Bujega has been working on a motor design that heavily relies on the capabilities of the printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication processes. His talk at the 2018 Hackaday Superconference covers how he built a brushless DC motor and speed controller into a PCB. You can watch the newly published video after the break.

The genesis of this idea came from Carl’s interest in drone design, in fact, he jumped right into a drone startup immediately after finishing his EE. The company didn’t last, but his thirst for interesting designs is ongoing. When looking at reducing the total parts necessary to build a quadcopter he happened on the idea of PCB-based coils and he’s followed it to this motor design, and beyond to some very interesting flexible-PCB robot design work which you can check out on his Hackaday.io page, YouTube, and Twitter.

OSH Park now offers 2 layer Flex PCBs for $15 per square inch including 3 copies of your design. Orders will be sent to fabrication weekly and ship within 21 calendar days of ordering. Find out more on our Flex documentation page.