There are many outboard BLDC motors with integrated driver around that are commonly used in vibrators and food processors, such as the BL4525:
https://kegugear.com/en/product/bl4525o-bl4525-45mm-bldc-brushless-motor.html
These motors have large torque and low speed which appears to be suitable as traction motors for RC cars or large scale model locomotives.
It has five wires - VCC, "FG" ground, "FG", direction, ground, PWM
The PWM pin is used to code for the target speed of the motor.
Then it has onboard driver which uses the information from the PWM pin to drive the coils with the target speed.
An important question: does the driver sense the speed of the motor, and decide the actual frequency of the coil accordingly, or blindly deliver whatever frequency it is told to do by the PWM pin, regardless of whether the motor is stalling or not?
Do you have experience in these motors?
I have the following questions:
- Are these motors really suitable for use as traction motors?
- Will these motors be very prone to damage by the weather due to exposed PCB?
- I plan to use 4-8 motors for the locomotive, as each motor will drive one axle in the nose suspended drive. The direction and target speed of each motor is going to be identical. In this case, if I use an arduino or raspberry board to provide the target speed information to the PWM wire, can I drive the PWM pins of all motors from the same PWM GPIO pin? Or should I instead use some sort of booster?
- I plan to use either an Arduino or raspberry board to control the locomotive. The board on the locomotive will need to communicate with the control station with wi-fi, then according to the command from the control station, it will set the target speed and direction of all motors, control lights and other functions of the locomotive, and maybe also report position of the locomotive. In this case, will Arduino or raspberry pi be more suitable?