Servo Motor Winding Leads

TychoBrahe

1 µW
Joined
Jan 9, 2025
Messages
3
Location
Tulsa
Hi
I'm not quite sure where to put this post, it said this site was good for windings but I don't see any posts on it. Any help is appreciated.

Is there a special wire type that is used for lead wires for servo windings? I think they require a more shielded wire than leads on other motors in order to prevent interference with the motor control signal. If there is a better thread or forum to post this please let me know.

Thanks!
 
If you mean servo motors like RC servos, like these:
1736463960052.png
then no, you don't normally need shielded wire for either the control connection from your PWM source to the servo casing, or from the internal control board to the motor itself. Here's a random image-search find for the internals of a servo, showing the wiring typically used in there.
1736464054916.png
A page about servos, with another exploded view
1736464376840.png

You can used shielded wire if you want to; what it does for you may vary depending on conditions/system. The motors in these are usually noisy brushed motors that make a crapload of RF from the brush arcs, and that gets radiated everywhere, not just in the wires, so just shielding them is unlikely to do very much.

If you have a brushless type, they wont' have the RF noise from the motor (no brushes) so the whole system is a lot quieter (electrrically)
1736464613020.png

If you are having problems with a system, tell us in detail what they are and what the system is and how it's set up, and we can suggest fixes or workarounds.
 
Last edited:
If you mean servo motors like RC servos, like these:
View attachment 364121
then no, you don't normally need shielded wire for either the control connection from your PWM source to the servo casing, or from the internal control board to the motor itself. Here's a random image-search find for the internals of a servo, showing the wiring typically used in there.
View attachment 364122
A page about servos, with another exploded view
View attachment 364123

You can used shielded wire if you want to; what it does for you may vary depending on conditions/system. The motors in these are usually noisy brushed motors that make a crapload of RF from the brush arcs, and that gets radiated everywhere, not just in the wires, so just shielding them is unlikely to do very much.

If you have a brushless type, they wont' have the RF noise from the motor (no brushes) so the whole system is a lot quieter (electrrically)
View attachment 364124

If you are having problems with a system, tell us in detail what they are and what the system is and how it's set up, and we can suggest fixes or workarounds.
Thanks for the great info!! It will come in handy for me in the future. For now, however, I was bamboozled by google AI telling me this forum was a global leader and trusted resource in all things regarding industrial high HP motors and their super large windings. :D

Great answer by you, bad question by me. The Futabas remind me when I used them in hobby and at school and look forward to using them again. I'm getting back into spending time with electronics and am glad to have this forum as a future resource. All best, Justin
 
Thanks for the great info!! It will come in handy for me in the future. For now, however, I was bamboozled by google AI telling me this forum was a global leader and trusted resource in all things regarding industrial high HP motors and their super large windings. :D
Ah, good ol' Ai. :/

Unfortunately AI does not "understand" or "comprehend" anything, it just relates things together in some way that was trained into it. That's not always bad, but it can mean nonsensical or unuseful results.


Great answer by you, bad question by me. The Futabas remind me when I used them in hobby and at school and look forward to using them again. I'm getting back into spending time with electronics and am glad to have this forum as a future resource.

The best way to fix that is to give us the "good" question, that includes the information necessary to answer it. ;)

If you're looking for info on those "industrial high HP motors and their super large windings", then telling us the specifics of the problem you're having with them (or expect to have), and the use-case for them, controller being used, etc., it's likely that we can help in some way.

There's a lot of people here with a lot of info, including people that custom design and build motors and controllers, so it's pretty likely that the info you are after is in the mind of someone here, if not already written down in a thread.
 
Last edited:
A picture will clear things up a bit. We have techs here that rewind motors, but servo motors are quite a different breed. I think the leads that come off the servo motor windings may need a special type of wire, possibly due to high frequencies used to drive the servo. Thanks

And yes, it really confused me when people started calling what we have today AI. To me Artificial Intelligence is a computer that learns, and in order to learn you need feedback from the user (otherwise why turn in your math homework :ROFLMAO: ). I don't think anyone that uses ChatGPT has ever taken the time to reply with whether the AI got things correct or not.
 

Attachments

  • DSCF0054.JPG
    DSCF0054.JPG
    2.5 MB · Views: 3
A picture will clear things up a bit. We have techs here that rewind motors, but servo motors are quite a different breed. I think the leads that come off the servo motor windings may need a special type of wire, possibly due to high frequencies used to drive the servo. Thanks

The only special wire I know of for high frequencies is called Litz wire. High enough frequency (RF) signals in a wire tend to run closer to the surface than the core of a conductor, so multistrand wire gets used for those, to give more surface for the "skin effect" to use. But that's for much higher frequencies than motors use, AFAIK. If there are motors that use radio frequencies then it may help them.

But it isn't shielded (though you could add a shield, like a braided sheath, to any wire--keeping in mind that whatever you use to insulate between the sheath and the other conductors inside it creates capacitance, so if you *are* using higher frequencies it could affect the signals. (various kinds of coax may have specific frequency bands they work better with, or specific applications, partly for this reason).



I can't see the actual wire used on those leads in the image clearly, but it looks like it's just the stiff motor winding wire twisted up and a contact crimped to it. They don't appear to have any shielding, and don't look like the litz wire I've seen in RF inductors and such (which was pretty floppy, not stiff, in the ones I disassembled while scrapping things for parts i could use for other stuff).

Litz wire is also made with insulation (at minimum some lacquer/enamel like with motor windings) between each conductor. Makes it thicker and so less well-packed than regular wire would be even if they both have the same number and size of strands. .


And yes, it really confused me when people started calling what we have today AI. To me Artificial Intelligence is a computer that learns, and in order to learn you need feedback from the user (otherwise why turn in your math homework :ROFLMAO: ). I don't think anyone that uses ChatGPT has ever taken the time to reply with whether the AI got things correct or not.
When I've tried to use it, mostly to see if it was worth my time, and if it could actually return useful code (jury still out on that one), it doesn't have a "rating" button to tell it whether hte answer is useful or right or whatever. It doesn't understand feedback in the text itself that tells it it's wrong; it seems to think a new question is being asked, or it gives nonsensical replies, etc.

Google has "labs" taht use AI, and they just recently added a thumbs up / down to the images that the ImageFX produces in response to text prompts. However, the function doesn't appear to do anything, as it doesn't change further output based on using those, in any way, AFAICT.

I use it to create "cover art" for my "music", as I don't have enough time to make the music *and* the artwork, and don't know anyone that is willing to help me out with that (or much of anything else) by making artwork based on what I intend the song to be about. ImageFX sort of kinda does something close enough, after I go thru enough iterations of descriptions. But once it heads down a wrong path, you can't fix that, and it appears to "remember" what it was doing in response to a particular description (even if the words are rearranged but you're still asking for the same thing), so you basically can't get any closer to what you're after once it "goes bad", which will eventually happen with any process with it, if you have to do enough iterations to get what you're after.
 
Back
Top