I am designing a large reduction gearbox for a brushless motor and want absolute positioning of the actuator after the reduction. Is this possible with only one encoder absolute magnetic encoder attached to the output of the gearbox?
Reading other posts it seems that the reduction would need to be equal to the number of motor poles. If so could I use two magnetic encoders–one on the motor output and another after the reduction for setting the absolute position?
Hi TLamp,
I’m generally going to say that unless you’re using an extremely expensive true zero-backlash gearbox (such as a strain wave gearbox), this is very much not recommended.
However, note that the ODrive Pro and S1 both have support for dual encoders. So you could have an encoder on both the input and the output of the gearbox, with the ODrive configured to use the motor encoder for motor control, and the gearbox output encoder for load position/velocity control.
Please let me know if you want any additional information!