Question 48 v 400 W motors

a friend of mine who is an engineer in automation has visited us for Christmas and he had a look at my 4dof rig based on AASD15A driver and servos 80ST serie. He asked me the following question " why don't you use 400 W 48 V motors with encoder" . I gave him the answer that the community is large, the control boards well documented and this is a powerful , reliable and relatively cheap solution.

He agrees with those aspects, but he thinks that if I need an easily transportable rig , servo and AASD15A drivers is not the good solution. " The cable management during transportation and installation in a new location will always be a big issue, and building a plug and play cabinet will be hard " he says.

Do you have an opinion about this statement?

What 400W 48V motors is your friend refering to? Does he mean the servo motors with integrated driver? (for example IHSV57 and similar?)

No matter what, it doesn't make much difference when it comes to wiring. Both types of motors need two cables per motor, one for power and one for the encoder. The integrated drives don't need seperate drivers in the control cabinet but they need extra power supplies.

The AASD15A drives and motors come with plug&play cables. So if you just label all connectors with matching numbers/idetifiers so that you can easily find the matching plug after disassembly and re-assembly you won't have any problems at all.

I have a sim 6dof project that uses dc 800w motors and encoders

It works great - you will need a powerful chip to read all the encoder pulses

Yes that's the kind of motors he noticed : IHSV57.
The point is that I need a transporable rig , I ' m going to bring it to different locations for clinics. So, it must be as plug and play as possible not to spend to much time fixing all the wiring.
The second point is that it musn't look like a "geek toy" , so as few cables as possible is the best.

How easy your can be transported has nothing to do with the type of motors. All suitable motors I know need two cables per axis.

For easy transportation I'd recommend building the rig on top of a standard pallet (0.8 x 1.2m) and putting those furniture casters with latch on each corner (If you don't have a fork lift ). If you manage to limit the width to 0.8m which should be possible for a 3DOF or 4DOF rig and even for a 6DOF where the platform is on top of the hexapod it will fit through a standard door and you can simply roll it onto a trailer.

you are right transportation should not have anything to do with type of motor......but in my case, owning a 4 dof rig, 3 dof + surge turns to be a little tricky. As you have 4 vertical actuators and one horizontal, the cabinet to wire all these must be out of the frame ( can't imagine all the drivers moving up and down or side to side with the rig ) .........What you say is true for a 6 dof or a 2 dof , where you can install all the drivers and control underneath the upper platform but is more difficult with a 4 dof rig which is at rest at 4 cm from ground , unless you accept more weight after building a frame ( with enough space for drivers ) underneath the rig where you fix everything .......the idea of the pallet is interesting . So i am looking forward the best solution with my AASD 15 A servo as the linear actuators are a very nice solution but face the problem of the cabinet that is not so easy to deal with during transportation