Massage Gun Integrated Outrunners

I have been looking at off the shelf low cost brushless outrunners with minimal wiring and complexity and have been experimenting with the BLDCs from massage guns.

They put out good torque (~0.1Nm - 3000rpm), are controlled over PWM (seems to be a voltage control drive), and have an 6 pulse per rev output.

Cost on AliExpress is $4.50 USD (probably surplus), for brand new ones they go for about $15 USD.

The only IC on it is a Nuvoton MS51FB9AE 8 bit micro.

They are so close to being the holy grail for me, but the firmware has extremely sluggish acceleration parameters.

Just wondering if other people find this interesting, or if there’s another solution out there I haven’t considered for this type of thing!

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Are you think of programming that chip? I can’t find and arduino compatibility, so it would seem a challenge. I guess you could pull the ic off and use a different driver but then not so cheap.

Theres something useful on the board already. I can see the drivers and hall sensors.
Just add some jump wire to arduino and try it. You may able to drive it with only 3 PWM and 3 hall pin.

OOPS I got it wrong.
This is the hall.

Hi @AlexR-D,
It is awesome the price of 3.9€ ! What is the reference of Mos ? Could you read the part ref ?
The family MS51 was the top of the microcontroller at the time :slightly_smiling_face:.

That is an option, but probably doesn’t make sense for me from a time perspective - without Arduino it would take a considerable time investment to program it from scratch and reverse engineer everything on the board.

Unless I got the source code…

I know, it’s unbelievable they can sell at these prices. Are you asking about the mosfets? They are marked “XT 1948” which doesn’t yield much on google.

If I make any progress on convincing a Chinese factory to make me custom firmware I will report back - using this board just for commutation would let you run simpleFOC with just a microcontroller. Hall feedback is enough for many applications.