Research: Motorizing manual coffee grinder

Projects
1

Hi all,

I’m in the initial stages of research for building a motorized drive for a manual coffee grinder.
I’m wondering if odrive would be a good fit.

The requirements are:

  • Relatively high torque (esp. on startup when the grinder is already loaded)
    • With a fine grind setting I measured about 3 Nm, so assuming 6 to have some headroom
  • Lowish RPM (~ 200)
  • Probably geared reducer (I’m thinking planetary gearbox)

Is this something you can see the odrive and some off the shelf rc motors work for, or do I need to look at something else?

Thanks!

2

Sounds a bit overkill, but of course ODrive can certainly do it if the motor can.
But, you’d probably need quite a powerful motor e.g. a hoverboard wheel (or use a gearbox as you say) to get that kind of torque.

3

Hm with overkill do you mean that I shouldn’t need such a sophisticated driver as odrive?

I’m worried that using a regular sensorless hobby esc will have problems with startup and the high torque requirements…

4

True, a sensorless ESC won’t have enough starting torque, but one using Hall sensors would work fine. It wouldn’t have precise velocity control either, but do you really need that for grinding coffee? :joy:
If you are building a robot arm to crank the handle on a manual mill, then yeah you need ODrive for that :slight_smile:

5

If you use one of the 8318 100KV motors, you might be able to skip the gearbox and go direct drive.