6DOF Motion Simulator with 180W Servo Motors

Some years ago I started to design a 6DOF motion simulator after I got inspired by pmvcdas (aka FlyPT) 6DOF using brushless (BLDC) motors with 220W of power.
Instead of the 220W BLDC motors I'm using 180W Servo motors by JMC. They are quite inexpensive and easy to control. However, they might have not enough power. I guess this is something i have to find out.

Until now I have finished all six linear actuators and ordered some steel tubes to start the construction of the upper and bottom frame. The bottom frame will be made from 80x40x2 steel tubes and the upper frame from 30x30x2 steel tubes.

The actuator housing is made from 70x70mm aluminum tubes while most plastic part are milled from POM. The rotary motion is transformed into lateral motion by a 1605 ballscrew. The pushrod is a 30x1 mm steel tube.

The final simulator will look something like this:


The renderd actuator looks like this:


And the real thing like this:
Video - Testing the actuator
Video - Testing the disassembled actuator



Here are some pictures of the series production :


That is all i have for now

Hi, I use the same motor for my simulator. I did some test with the motor to determine its load capability if you are interested to know.

Hi, thank you for your reply. Of course I'm intrested. I just had a look at your motion rig. It looks realy nice. I had something similar in mind alternativly to my actual design. As you said I would have used the jmc 400w Motors.
How is you experience with your 180w Motors? Are you still statisfied?
I tried to lift myself with one of my actuators (75kg). It was able to lift me, but sometimes it cut of. However, I think it will be okay, as I have six of them.
What Power supply do you use?

I pair the motor with 4mm pitch ball screw. With 80kg load(max that I tested) it has no problem if moving slowly ( below 50mm/s) and changing direction. When moving faster then it can trigger the safety cutout, mostly when changing direction. With 50kg load it has no problem at 150mm/s (fastest that I tried).
I guess because power = mass x speed, I have to choose whether to have heavy load with low speed or light load with high speed.

So I limit my sim to 200kg including driver. With 4 actuator it is working fine for more than 2 years already.
You have six so 300kgs should be no problem.

I use 1500w psu for each 2 of them. Meaning each actuator get 750w because during acceleration it can take 3 times the rated power. Before that I tried with 400w psu for 1 actuator but the psu will brown-out.

So far I'm very happy with it. The 400w version is too expensive and you can get 750w servos with just a little bit more money.

Thank you, I'm happy to hear that I might expect my rig to work. Also thank you for the information regarding the psu. I was calculating with much less.
I read in one of you Posts, that your Controller was only able to archive 200mm/s. Was this because the Limited speed of switching the input and output of your arduino? I also had this Problem but I manage to use the Port Manipulation of the microcontroller instead of using the slow pinWrite() of the arduino ide. If this still is an issue for you I can give you more Information about it. However, now I'm using an esp32, bahcause it is much faster and i also can use Bluetooth for diagnose.

I'm using 4 timer interrupts to produce the pulses, one for each motor and direct port manipulation. If I go more than 200mm/s it will interrupt the PID cycle so much and will make it unstable. But I can get 1000hz PID cycle and going any faster also not necessary because of the motor limit.

Ah okay. For what are you using the PID? Currently I only translate the Position signals from Flypt Mover to pulses and send them to the motors.
Don't you need a position signal from the motors for a PID cycle?

I use PID to control pulse frequency(motor speed) in order to get smooth motion. I imagined that without proportionate speed control motor will keep alternating between full and zero speed and motion will be rough. Didn't test it though. Position data just sum of pulse sent.

I actually saw Jamecon's integrated motor，

this is a China small factory，

hahaha

I'm not sure what you want to say to me with this comment .

However, there is a little bit of progress. I desided that I would like to connect my actuator with RJ-45 LAN Cable so I bought RJ-45 Breakout Boards and modified my Motor caps. I still need to wire and assemble it.

Great work! Did you manage to get it working ok? I’m considering doing the same thing.