What's a 'digital motor'?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Does anyone notice blatant marketing terms in commercials? A new vacuum has a ‘digital motor’. Now, maybe the motor is controlled digitally; but it just sounds like a word they through in to make it sound better. Heck, my 30-year-old Hoover Decade 80 has a digital motor! (I use my index digit to turn it on and off.)

Or how about those storage bags you vacuum the air out of? They don’t just have valves; they have turbo valves! Sweet! And the price is so reasonable! The air mattresses I had when I was a kid, beach balls, inflatable toys, and even the full-sized inflatable mattresses I have now only had a simple valve with a flap to keep the air from rushing out before you could plug it. Imagine how much better they’d work if they had turbo valves!

2

Well, there is such a thing as a stepper motor, which can be thought of as being controlled digitally–it goes to a precise position in response to a specific number of input pulses–but those have been around for years.

“Digital motor”? Probably just meaningless marketing hype. An excellent example of why marketing types get a bad reputation among technical types.

3

It seems to be more of a name of a product that used the word digital then anything actually digital. But here is what Dyson says about it

“Dyson digital motors use digital pulse technology, spinning at up to 104,000 times a minute”

4

Sounds like it might be a ruggedized stepper motor, then. I just wish they wouldn’t blur and confuse things. This is especially unnecessary if you have a good product–it makes people suspicious.

5

From the description, it sounds like they are referring to a brushless DC motor, which uses digital control to control its operation. There are real advantages to this approach - there are no brushes (hence the name), increasing reliability and electrical noise (of course, you have a much more complex electronic circuit to control it, but then computer fans, even the smallest ones in laptops of an inch or so, for example use BLDC technology, although those are much simpler). Even when compared to AC induction motors (also brushless), they have advantages such as higher efficiency, although require a DC power source (with some loss converting AC to DC).

Of course, they probably call it a “digital” motor just for the sake of the name, thinking it sounds more impressive.

6

A digital motor is one where the marketing flacks give the consumer the finger.

7

Maybe a digital motor is one in which some important feature is just left out to scrimp on the manufacturing cost, and then somebody does some trick creating the superficial impression that the feature is still there. You know, like a digital zoom.