micro mosquito RC flying helicopter (vs havoc heli picco z)

I picked up the Micro Mosquito from Radio Shack the other day. Its hard to compete with the Picco Z even with 3 motors and 3ch control.

Click below for a review

part I

part II

Take apart that PC Box Fan- see what’s inside brushless DC motor

I have been thinking about brushless motors for a while now, and I wanted to replace a small brush motor with a brushless one but wasn’t sure how to go about it. I looked up how they work to refresh my memory, then I thought I might make one out of permanent magnets and a few coils, but how was I going to control the switching of the coils? If I did use some kind of IC chip to do the logic it would add cost. Then I thought maybe I can just use some kind of analog circuit. Like maybe an infrared sensor tied to a transistor to time the pulses, or maybe a hall effect sensor. So Looked up “simple brushless motor” and found this site. It shows you how to make your own with all those sensors including a reed switch, pros cons etc.

I started to feel like making my own would be a pain and not efficient anyway, so I tried to think of a brushless motor I could find around the house and remembered that PC fans are brushless. I was pretty sure the PC only gave a voltage to the fan and did not offer any pulsing, so the motor must have some logic circuit built in. Perfect. I looked for photos online of PC fans opened up but a quick searched turned up nothing. I don’t know if a PC fan has enough power for what I’d like it to do. But I knew I was ready to take one apart.

So I found an old PC fan that I am pretty sure didn’t work and went at it.