Electrical advice for motorizing props?

[Diamondback]

Y'all might recall my project motorizing the Atlantis B-36. Motors arrived a couple days ago, and while I'll need to do a little cutting on the lower wings in the nacelles the fit just fine - the bad news is they're a direct fit, shaft pokes right out the prop hole with no room for a driveline or spline so I'll have to cut the propshafts and drill and epoxy the hubs.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807876109017.html

3v CR2032 battery turns one at acceptable speed, haven't tried two and gotta find my wirestrippers first. At 40 mA draw,  what am I looking at needing to keep all six of these turning? I'm also toying with the idea of a two-stage power switch that would run four motors on two batteries on "slow cruise" then connect a third battery and the other two motors on "full power".

[Wardukw]

Mate you need a micro ESC's ..since the current draw on these are very low you could use a micro ESC which will run two engines at once ,,that will handle those 6 easy ,,the only issues i can see then is the need for a small lipo battery ,,wouldn't look at 7.4V ,,thats to much powder i'm thinking .3V sort of deal....then you'll need a receiver and transmitter to control it  ..yah this is starting to sound more like a RC plane than a model ,,yeah i'll hush up now .

[frank2056]

You could use something like this  4Pcs Mini L298N 2 Channel H Bridge DC Motor Driver Board Three boards for the six props and you have a board left over. Or this one for the same price and have three spares. You'll have to calculate how much current all 6 motors draw when running, but a 3.7V Lipo battery or a large capacity 18650 Li-ion battery might be enough to run the props for a few minutes.

[Diamondback]

Part of the game is trying to keep this simple (I want everything except the umbilical running up to the plane to be less than 1/4"), but I want the props to run for a 2-3 hour gaming session. This is a very large gaming miniature I'm building, so low weight, low volume and high durability are important when Barney Breakmyfingers shows up with a compulsion to finger-eff every damn thing he sees until someone throws him out.

The easy button I was thinking of was just like kids' toys or  an on-steroids version of the Atlantis Snoopy Camel, battery then six motors wired in series. The more complicated this gets the more I'm going to have to deal with the nuisances of shipping it back and forth when the idiot client decides he needs to be Danny Dumbass YET AGAIN and bugger it somehow that it needs to come back to me for repairs.

[kerick]

Would these motors be helpful? They are geared down so the props would still spin slower.

https://precisionminidrives.com/product/6mm-mini-dc-gear-motor-17mm-type-model-nfp-609-26-45-0675-standard-shaft?utm_source=Google%20Shopping&utm_campaign=Copy%20pmd%20feed&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=104293&gad_source=1&gad_campaignid=18478080173&gbraid=0AAAAAomY7RWMZBsS9Hu-taWNqIf0Bh_dw&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIzdKzyfaLjwMVWjYIBR3m7SFUEAQYCCABEgJqpvD_BwE

[Diamondback]

Kerick, I already have the motors I linked in hand (which appear to be different vendor same product WITHOUT the highway-robbery shipping). Manufacturer spec is 240rpm at 3v.

[zenrat]

Tell us more about Barney Breakmyfingers and Danny Dumbass.  They sound like the sort of people I have to deal with at work...
 

[Diamondback]

Tell us more about Barney Breakmyfingers and Danny Dumbass.  They sound like the sort of people I have to deal with at work...
 

Good to know there's at least one other person who feels the pain of having to deal with people that have a pathlogical compulsion to pick up, finger-*couch* and break every little damn thing they see. "Barney Breakmyfingers" is the kind who'll grab pieces of your model  off your bench WHILE your working on it, or grab a gaming miniature off the table just because "well nobody was doing anything with it that instant"... DUH, you fricking moron, that player just hadn't GOTTEN to it yet, you just ruined all of the maneuver and fire planning for that figure's unit, possibly an entire battle strategy! *seething*

[Rheged]

Tell us more about Barney Breakmyfingers and Danny Dumbass.  They sound like the sort of people I have to deal with at work...
 

I think I once taught them..............no pencil sharpener was safe within 6 feet of them.

[loupgarou]

Back to the electrical part. What about simply using a train set power unit, and testing the motors in various parallel/series combinations till you find an r.p.m. you like?

[Diamondback]

Why? I already HAVE motors in hand that fit the space envelope, they're already AT acceptable RPM. We have the load already locked (those 1/184 B-36 nacelles are a TIGHT fit!) but the question is the power pack to run them. Preferably something that can be done with no circuit-board making equipment and limited tools by a fumblefingered klutz. When I get home I'll try to shoot a pic of an upper wing with the motors resting in it so you can see just what we're dealing with. EDIT: My bad, you're talking about a big clunky train PSU to feed the motors, not the motors themselves. Problem is a typical train powerpack is 12V, which will be a massive overload for these little guys. And while that might work on the build bench, it needs to be free of umbilicals when I turn this monster loose to "fly" the Unfriendly Skies of the wargaming tabletop.

Am I misfiguring that six motors at 40mA load each means I need a 240mA supply? Explain like you're talking to a second-year high-school Electronics Tech student 25 years ago who needs a refresher course, please.

[loupgarou]

I didn't know you were thinking of flying the B-36 around, as I am assuming from your later posts. I had supposed the model would be "static", on some runway or on an appropriate support, so the power supply could be external, without need for batteries. I was thinking of using a train power pack to test various combinations of parallel/series connections between the motors to find the voltage and r.p.m. you liked best. With a train power pack (and of course with a lot of different and more serious power sources) voltage is variable from 0 to 12 V, if you own a multimeter you can verify the voltage. AND, you can rev-up and down the aircraft engines, more fun.,
If it's a "flying" plane, of course you will need batteries in the fuselage, and you'll have to leave it "openable" in order to change the batteries from time to time, and of course some sort of switch.

[Diamondback]

For what it's worth, LG, I apologize for being a mite short. This project has seemed to be one exercise after another in noting "it needs to be simple and rugged with as few tools and components as possible since once the model's sealed up no further maintenance possible" and one person after another pretty much everywhere chimes in with their pet hobbyhorse trying to add more components, more cost and more complexity and arguably trying to get me to just outsource the job to them. Double frustrating on a local non-modelling craftsman forum where some of the guys I doubt they could correctly assemble a 1980s Snaptite kit, never mind the nightmare of badly aged tooling like this kit is.

Intent: If you're familiar with games like Wings of Glory, Blood Red Skies or Check Your 6, that's the application. You do raise an idea... since WoG runs at two plane speed settings, I was thinking of undervolting the motors for Slow and running them full-power for Fast.

Have pics of a motor testfit on the phone, will see about pushing them over after I slog through a hard-drive cleanup. Could be a few days because I have things that need to be sorted before push to external storage, and every time I run a disk cleanup Windows seems to find creative new ways to shovel more junk into the space I just cleared. Whoever said SSD's were the greatest thing since sliced bread never had to make do with only 256GB... seriously, I have an SD card in this thing with four times the capacity as an "auxiliary/buffer drive".

[Diamondback]

Update... an electrician buddy and I figured two twin-pack AA's in series-parallel. Each two-battery clip is in series for the 3v, then two such clips in parallel to get the amps up. Have six motors, have the clips and a multimeter, now I gotta figure out the resistance for a voltage-drop on Low Speed. Wish I could find a switch that looked like a tiny throttle quadrant...

And then Saturday before last I'm in a car accident that breaks my weak-side collarbone, still trying to get in with Orthopedics, so pretty much all my activities are one hand on keyboard for a while.

[Old Wombat]

Oh, happy-joy! 

Hope the bone-knitting & recovery goes well!