 This week, IonMPI is brought to you by DigiKey and Adafruit, and this week's IonMPI is from Johnson Electric. Lady Eda, what is this week's IonMPI? Okay, so this week's IonMPI is from a new company, so welcome to the IonMPI party. This is from Johnson Electric. It's a Hong Kong-based company that makes motors and other motion control devices, and they have these pretty cool. I call them Pancake, although I think that there's probably some other name for them, but short solenoids. Are you going to call it Pancake? I'm going to call it Pancake. I don't know. Every time something is kind of like round and flat, you know, in electronics, you tend to call it Pancake. So I'm going to call them Pancake solenoids, so they make a range of different motor control devices. In fact, their history, which I'll talk about in a little bit, is pretty neat. They make, you know, steppers and DC motors and other coils and piezo stuff. And so, you know, motion control, when people talk about motion control, usually is something like a DC motor. And, you know, the motor is, a lot of people have seen motors before, you know, you apply AC or DC current, and it rotates like there's permanent and electromagnets inside, and it rotates round and round. And so you get a rotational motion, and then you can convert that rotational motion with a whack and pinion. Here's a 3D print project that we did, which has eyes in it, but you don't have to have eyes on your whack and pinion. But it helps. And this turns rotational motion to linear motion. This is a repetitive linear motion. There's also, you know, if you have a stepper motor and a worm gear or a lead screw, you can turn it into linear motion. So this is from a CD-WAM or DVD player, and you can perform, you know, fairly fast linear motion this way. And it's very precise, but it isn't, it doesn't have, it has a lot of force through it, but it isn't kind of like instantaneous. And for that kind of instantaneous motion between two set points, you would use something like a solenoid. So this is a push-pull solenoid that we stock in the shop. And basically, you can see in the middle, there's that blue section, and that's the coil, right? So there's a coil of copper of, you know, of a variety of gauges, a number of turns, and that, the number of gauges, sorry, the number of turns, and that gauge of the coil wire is what determines the resistance in the power and also the force by which the slug, which is that center bar, moves in. So when you apply current to the coil, it, you know, thanks to Maxwell's equations, it forms an electromagnet, and the slug is pulled in towards the center of the coil. This is like a cool diagram showing. The force, the electromagnetic force is strongest in the center. There's a moving slug. Sometimes it's captive. Sometimes there's a spring. So this is a push-pull. And as you can see on the left, there's a spring. So every solenoid works the same way. It always pulls the slug into the center of the coil. But then when the voltage and the current, the power is released, this particular solenoid has a spring that, you know, brings the slug back out. And doesn't, this spring isn't as strong. So if you want it to, like, perform a strike or, you know, move something, now you're going to get the most force on activation, not on the release, unless you have a very strong spring. But most people don't. So the solenoids that they make, if you compare to the previous solenoids we just showed, those are all rectangular. And those are kind of the standard ones. They're candy bar shaped solenoids. There's, you know, a coil and there's a rectangular frame. These are interesting because they're much flatter. So they're easier to tuck into an area because they do have a big coil, but the coil is kind of instead of like long and thin, it's wide and flat, like a pancake. And so they make a variety of different solenoids. And I'll show you the size range is quite extreme. I ordered two and didn't even realize how different. I mean, I looked at the photos, but like until you have it in your hand I don't realize like how much different the sizes are. But the good news is that there's step models for each solenoid. So if you want to use it in your mechanical design, and none of these come with springs, sort of a turn spring, usually that's built into your design. Like usually the frame is what has that return force. And so it's not built into the solenoid on purpose. Do check the spec sheet for each one. There's I think 12 volt and 24 volt. And there might be maybe a 36 or 48 volt one as well, although I definitely bought 12 volt ones because that's what I like to use the most because I have 12 volts power supplies. Usually people use whatever power supply they need. I will say these use a lot of current, right? Solenoids are high current devices. So talking about a couple amps a piece easily, depending on the size. And so be aware of that. You don't need a very clean power supply, but you do need a lot of current. And solenoids don't, or at least these, I didn't see any that are latching type. So basically as long as it's activated, as that slug is pulled in, you're drawing a lot of current. So when you spec it, do pay attention to the sizes and current requirements, the voltage requirements, and they have a wide range. Another thing that was kind of interesting is, you know, I always go to the YouTube channel of the company to see if they have any videos demonstrating or showing off the capabilities of the MPI that we've chosen. And why didn't find any solenoid videos? I found some other motor videos. I did find a really cool series in the Johnson Electric YouTube channel called like chats with old timers. And- Yeah, it's like a documentary. It's kind of neat because they just found like, you know, these women and men who've been working at the Johnson Electric factories in Hong Kong since like, you know, 1970s, 60s when the company was formed. And you know, they had really cool old photos and stories about what it was like. This is one of the first companies to make motors in Hong Kong. And at the time, you know, of course, we think of China and Hong Kong as major electric manufacturing and export companies. But at the time, you know, they were making toys, but they were not making the electronic components as weren't being imported, in this case from Japan. And so, you know, this company, Johnson, you know, they decided they wanted to try making motors themselves. And I guess they used to do garment as well. Another thing that's interesting is the name Johnson, you'd think that perhaps the name of the company came from a guy named Johnson, but it's actually not. It's a transliteration of, I guess like Cantonese phrase that means all the quality that you can fit in every inch of a product. Like it's a transliteration, like which is backwards, right? Like usually, like we have Coca-Cola and then when it gets transliterated into like another language, they kind of try to make it fit to have some people. We'll have a little bit of that video, a minute of it if you wanna play. Yeah, we'll play that, all right, we'll play that at the end. We can play it now. Yeah, let's play it now. Okay. And then we're gonna. I forgot that I included the video. Yeah, and then we'll come in for the big conclusion. Okay. So here you go. The name Johnson in Chinese, it is called Zhou Chun. Zhou means the construction, the best construction, Chun means inch, every inch of work, means every stitch of work. And my dad later told me why he picked the motor is because he believed the little motor will be something which is going to be there forever in a way that affect people's lives, that you will use it in many, many appliances. I think it was a genius decision. I'm thankful for it every day. Motion systems, electric motors is affording us way more opportunities like I just said than potentially being, you know, a garment for example. It was difficult years in the beginning. We are the first one in Hong Kong to make the motors. Before that, you know, the toy factories in Hong Kong are all importing expensive motors from overseas. I don't think my dad understood how it worked. Being contrarian, if you don't have a local customer, find one overseas. If you don't have technology local, go to the place with the technology. So in a way, this is what happened to Johnson. All right, we're back. Okay, so I basically told the story of this company within the video, but do go and watch the two videos, because I watched them and they were like, even though I didn't know anything about this company, they were really well made and awesome videos, and it was really neat to listen to folks talk about the history of Hong Kong and manufacturing because it's honestly not that different than the story of New York manufacturing. So I thought it was a little bit of a reminder of the radio industry here in New York. Okay, so anyways, about these solenoids. There's a lot of solenoids. I took a quick screenshot. There's just a lot of different ones that are all on stock. I just picked one that I thought was pretty cool. It's a chonker and I'll show it off. And they're just massive. This one has a 3D model view. It's available on Digikate. It's available on Digikate. That is a chonk. Let's go to the overhead to conk. So I will warn you, this big one, which is the one I picked, it'll mess you up if you're not careful. So I'm just gonna show like, this is the motor and I've got this 12 volt and you'll see how incredibly strong it is. Hold on. Kind of scared. It is a little scary. Really? Yeah. Okay, ready? Yeah. Whoa. Yeah. Like, it'll actually like. It'll want to hurt you. It'll mess up your finger. Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's put that away. We're gonna put this away. And we're gonna bring out, it's small friend. Hi. Hey. Hi, little buddy. Hey, buddy. So this is the mini one. All right, don't feed that one too much. No, this guy now. This is a little baby. But this show. So yeah, when it's, and you know, it's still quite strong. Like I can't quite. Yeah, I can pinch you though. It, yeah, do be careful. But this is the slug and so. Yeah. Yeah, I don't want to be careful. Yeah. Okay, I'll release it. Okay. And then you can, there's a little ring there. Yeah. But I'll do this again. That's dangerous, IonMPI yet. Yeah. And so normally you would have a spring on the back, like some, maybe some rubber or like a, you know, a metal that will push it back out. And each one, do check the data sheet for the stroke. Like it doesn't work if you have it too far out. Like it does have to be, you know, partially. You have to make sure it's the right. There you go. It's partially amount. Okay. So little mini solenoid and being chunker solenoids. So do watch out for your fingers with this one. But for the strength you're getting with this solenoid, it's not a very deep one. I mean, this isn't actually much deeper than the solenoids that we stock, but it's like much more likely to crush you. In a good way. And that's this week's IonMPI. IonMPI.