Episode: 3707
Title: HPR3707: Recovering a Massive 3.5 HP Electric Motor from a Treadmill
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3707/hpr3707.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 04:25:35

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3707 for Tuesday the 18th of October 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Recovering a Mass of 3.5 HP Electric Motor from a Treadmill.
It is hosted by mechatronia and is about 17 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, Retrieval of Future Robot Parts in the Field.
Alright, mechatronia, I go in the field here.
And there's a dump out here, which is not a dump, but people have been dumping all kinds
of wood and scraps, stoves and weird shit, even though there's a transfer station further
down the road.
But there's a bunch of stuff here, so what I noticed is a treadmill.
So I'm currently taking this apart and taking the first screws off and this is the bottom
shoot, there it goes, bottom part of it, and some nails piercing my shoes because some
idiots tossed wood on top of this stuff, at least if you're going to put scrap out
in the middle of the dirt road, you may as well put it all in one place and sort it
somewhat, you know, don't put wood on top of the electronics, but anyway, I'm glad
it's here in the landfill because I've got one, I do have one big motor from a treadmill
that I took apart before, it's about half the size of this one, this one is just massive.
So the treadmill is called an epic and it has a display as well, so I'm going to take
that out as well, right now, so yeah, this motor, like I had a motor before, this motor
is like twice the size of the last one, and it's got a belt driven assembly here that
turns this big roller thing for inertia, I guess, and that turns your treadmill.
So it's got some electronics to drive it, and I'll be able to make use of it, but take
that off anyway, because I use DC, but this thing probably plugs it, it'll definitely
plugs into the wall, no doubt, 130 volts DC, how many 18, 650s, cells do I need, 162 by
3.7, more than 40, so, I don't know if I should keep this assembly, the whole assembly,
just take the motor, probably just take the motor and the display, this second figure
out how to incorporate this roller, attach wheels to it or something, but probably will
just get you the motor, man, this thing is massive, holy, can make a scooter or something,
it's even too big to use for bicycle, man, it's just so wide, it's like over a foot long,
and about 5 inch diameter, what a beast, well a beast, so yeah, get out there, start diving
stuff like this, this stuff is so, like I can't believe scavengers aren't on this, but
I guess there's no, there's no market in the old motors, let the scat, the copper scavengers
happen, probably a lot of copper in this thing, yeah, make sure you watch Dave Jones guy,
Ozzie's always jumping into dumpsters and stuff, it's pretty inspirational, I did update
the mobile computer battle station, I found some xboxes and used a bunch of connectors and
actually the plug-in cable itself, so I've got a actual plug-in, where I can plug-in,
into the box that I will be a battle station, which consists of a battery pack, it consists
of a battery pack, a buck converter and a boost converter, and it charges my computer
about two times over, I've got five parallel four series, but yeah, this is going to
be fun playing with this motor here, well I probably won't be playing with it too much,
and we'll probably just start until I find another, like this, and then I can make something
useful out of it, because it'll have two motors, but it might be smart to keep the housing
that's in, it's just massive though, and I don't really have any place to put it, hmm,
I'll have to think about that, it's got a very stack cap, Verista cap, 10 nano-fared
250 volt AC, I don't know what that is, probably has something to do with converting the
AC to DC, for this crazy thing, I don't even see any screws on this thing, oh jeez,
I already stepped on nail up here, shoot, not into my foot, hmm, I can't even see how
to do it, oh there's the mount, okay, okay, it's just going to be a couple of screws
sockets, about 12mm looks like, I just replaced my alternator, I can sort of identify sizes
on site, alright HPR and I'm going to go, so I hope this inspires you to get out there
and see what's out there, you two can have massive motors that one day, if you're diligent,
you know, you'll have enough for a robot or two, a big robot, I've made small robots so far
with the printer technology, 3.5 horsepower continues to, holy, three horses in this thing,
horses are powerful, crazy, alright, see you next time, alright, back at the lair, so
thought I'd do a wrap up on what I got, put some pictures up, so hopefully your podcast app
can do pictures or go check it out at hackerpublicradio.what is it org, whatever, so let's look at figure four,
let's say my gets of everything there, so I got a few useful things, starting at sort of the top
right there, there's a little wire end, a sensor that was pointed at the the attorney end of the
roller that the belt driven thing turned, so it must be, I didn't see any dots or anything on it,
like a normal wood with a sensor, maybe it's a heat sensor, I don't know, it's got riding on,
I didn't look at it too closely yet though, so next down from top right, you see that big bar
and stuff, I was gonna take that off but I didn't have another wrench to brace there, the wrench,
the screw and the nut with, you need two wrenches for that kind of thing, there's a nut and a screw
and it's pretty tight, but this is, we see a perpendicular to the big bar, to the right of it
there, we see where that box with the wires coming out, plugs into it, that is a big screw, so this
this is a motor, this is the incline motor for it, so got two motors out of it, and this thing's
for sure got a lot of torque, it lifts something up and down, that's pretty heavy with this thing,
so I think it's AC though, I'm not sure, but that's without very cap is part of too,
the very cap, it's got all those wires sticking out of it, very cool, very interesting, so next we
got the epic screen, it says epic on it, so there's a little display there, I'm not sure if I'm
going to be able to get it working, it's got a circuit board bearing,
there's plugged into that crazy control board up top and I snip most of the wires,
we'll see, I didn't, I brought limited tools, and then continuing along crossing the
center to at the bottom of the screen to slightly the left, you see a green and a black,
black plugs, those are pretty nice audio plugs, actually they're pretty heavy duty,
three nice leads from them each, pretty thick wires, so definitely reusable, heavy duty audio plugs,
very nice to find, and I wasn't expecting it, but there's a rocker switch right in the bottom
left there, a nice red rocker switch, which I'm going to incorporate into my mobile computer
battle station, because I need another switch, so I can turn off the five volt supply, I'm just,
I'm going to have the 19 volt on all the time through the boost converter, and I've got the
buck converter as well, bringing it down to five volts, because I'm going to be running
other stuff, plan to run orange pines stuff like that, so that's really cool,
and it's red, it should actually be the master switch, but I think I'll be too lazy to
switch it out with the other one that I've already got wired as the master, but maybe,
and there we have the motor there, of course, and next to the motor on the left is the control for
the motor, so there's, it looks like there's a couple of MOSFETs there, on the massive heat sink on
the left, there's an IRF something or other, and there's also, there's a rectifier on that heat sink
as well for the AC, so this board converts to AC, converts to DC, I mean, converts AC to DC,
and runs that motor, but I don't know, hopefully there's something useful,
I can get out of that board, because I, I use just DC for my power,
figure five, I found that some irons there, it's actually a bed frame, and I was like,
it looks like a frame for something, gears in the mind start turning, so,
yeah, so figure six, I need to find another treadmill, of either of these two varieties,
um, the bottom one, like they're both 130 volts, I see on the labels, so I guess that's a standard,
the bottom one has an amperate, 17 amps, like that's insane, and the top one does not even have
the amperating, but damn, it's gonna kick some ass, if I ever, then just to find another one,
I'm sure I will eventually, but yeah, so that's some of the unexpected rewards of
having people throw stuff out into the woods, so yeah, if you can, they should really have
like a big room, like a big warehouse type room where people can take apart stuff that gets sent
to those recycling centers, like sign a waiver or something, and just, you know, let people get
use out of it, because there's a lot of working TVs, there's working computers, I mean, if there's
too much competition, have a lottery or something for the good stuff, but don't throw that stuff away,
man, don't recycle it into its component elements, and I'm not against that, well, I don't know,
it uses a lot of energy, the, uh, there's a podcast, uh, I forget the name right now, it's uh,
but they talk about the recycling, and I didn't like it very much, because that's so
energy-intensive, and they're supposed to be, you know, grabbing this stuff, and I think it's
just really wasteful, but the Lithium Ion episode is pretty interesting, oh yeah, a welcome diversion,
it's called, so I don't really necessarily recommend the podcast, because I'm against throwing
the kind of recycling in principle, but the Lithium Ion one, pretty interesting, uh,
how he describes it, there's setting up these recovery facilities through Lithium Ion batteries,
but, uh, yeah, I much prefer this way, so get out there, uh, bring tools in your car with you,
when you're out and about, and always be prepared to jump when there's opportunity, I actually
waited a little too long, like I saw this thing out there before, and then I waited until it was
covered in wood, so that's, I'm from a bunch of wood today, I wouldn't have to do that if I acted
sooner, but that's what I do. All right, later.
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