Video: DC Motor Basics

Your presentation is becoming more professional. Be careful..Hollywood may be watching...

I like it, nice style and not too long. How did you do the graphic?

If ever you redo I thought a little more explanation of the brushes/commutator switching action and reason for odd number of rotor segments would answer the kind of question that a young mind leaps to.

I am going to show your video to my kid!

piglet

Thank you. Finding subjects that are a nice fit to a 15-20 minute video is actually a bit of a chore. 90 minute lectures would be easier, but far more tedious to watch.

The graphics were generated in Scilab. Its graphics abilities are pretty crude but it can do the math behind the motion simulation quite easily. I just did it as stop-motion animation, generating still for each frame in the video, then put it all together with ffmpeg.

I would like to do nicer-looking graphics in something like Blender, but my experiences with that are that (A), it takes time to get things looking good, (B), I'm never going to be much of an artist, (C), I'd have to bend over backwards to either simulate stuff accurately in Blender, or import position information, and (D), it's a rabbit hole into which I'm afraid that I would jump, and then not come out of for a very very long time. So it'd be lots of time lost for not a lot of gain.

If it's a hit, there's a bazzilion "build your own motor" vids. I was considering doing that as part of the video, but I had the sense to check first; both of the ones that I looked at were winners, so I figured I didn't need to add anything.

(I did not check to see how many "this is how a motor works" videos there might be -- I wanted to do this one regardless.)