Brushless Beetle Drive

[Rapidrory]

I was working on a project for brushless beetle drive motors, but I didn't end up doing anything with it and so am dismantling it for another project. However the set-up worked very nicely and so I felt I'd post the details here in case someone else finds it useful.



Uses one of these brushless
and the gearboxes from the standard beetle motor
Obviously different ratios can be selected; about a 20:1 ratio should give the same output speed as a normal beetle motor..



To fit the two together, I just pulled the cog off the DC motor, and pressed it onto the shaft of the brushless (some loctight wouldn't go amiss to keep the cog tight on the shaft). The shafts are both 2mm, the brushless' one just needs hammering through until it sticks out the back.

Both the brushless and gearbox have multiple mounting holes, so the brushless just bolts straight to the gearbox. And that's pretty much it; only took about 10 mins. Worked really nicely, weighs ~53g; 30g lighter than regular beetle motors, and substantially shorter.

I used a 10A car ESC for mine, but didn't get a programming card so don't know how much it can be reprogrammed. As it was it was fairly unusable.

Apparently these should work well given some reprogramming, though I can't speak from experience.

I hope this is useful to someone...