D6374 Motor to Motor Proximity Question

Greetings!

I’m very new here and have just acquired an Odrive 3.6, two D6374 motors, and two AMT10E2 encoders.

My first question is how close can I mount these two motors to each other? My first attempt was fastened to a 1/4" thick aluminum plate with the motors’ shafts sitting about 7 cm apart, one above the other, both pointing is the same direction.

When I manually or through the Odrive turn one of the motors the other motor will rock, so there is some magnetic coupling.

I’ve removed the motors and mounted them to a test rail for calibration, but how close can these motors be mounted together and not cause interference?

I have some tight space constraints. This is for an experiment for control loading a high-torque, two-axis hand controller.

There may be some slight magnetic coupling, but with a high resolution encoder like the AMT10E2 and with well tuned feedback control, it shouldn’t be a problem I think.

Thank you. I was suspecting that the proximity was causing my motor errors, but even with the two motors about 20 cm apart I was still getting motor errors:

system: no error
axis0
axis: no error
motor: Error(s):
MotorError.UNKNOWN_TORQUE
MotorError.UNKNOWN_VOLTAGE_COMMAND
DRV fault: none
sensorless_estimator: no error
encoder: no error
controller: Error(s):
ControllerError.OVERSPEED
axis1
axis: no error
motor: no error
DRV fault: none
sensorless_estimator: no error
encoder: no error
controller: no error

I think I have something else ill defined.

I increased the two motors’ drive shaft center-to-center distance from 7 cm to 9.5 cm and that seems to stop the motor errors I was getting.

1 Like

Static electricity maybe? Brushless motor shafts can get really big static charge (you can buy special brushes to reduce this)

At 7cm distance and no power applied to the motors. turning one motor by hand would cause the other to try to move.

They were magnetically coupled at that distance. At 9.5 cm that didn’t happen. Inverse square law.

1 Like

Wow! I’m impressed