Linear Actuators 101 - for Woodworkers

[Music] [Music] in this video we'd be talking about linear actuators I'm currently working on the stand-up desk that uses these linear actuators that move up and down and since I'm waiting for the last coat of finish to dry I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to go through how to wire up a linear actuator and show you guys just how easy it is a lot of people think these things are really complicated and they're really not they're actually really simple if you're building furniture and you want to make things move up and down or side to side or lift up a door or anything like that a linear actuator might be the way to go these things are really powerful and you can operate them on a little rocker switch so you might be wondering what exactly is a linear actuator anyways a lot of people when they see these things they think oh you've got hydraulics we got hydraulics in that desk these aren't hydraulics hydraulics move with fluid whereas these are electric so basically what you have is you have a 12-volt DC motor which internally turns us big screw in here and so when the motor turns the screw the screw then pushes and pulls on this rod and so they make these in a bunch of various different lengths and capacities this particular model is a 12 inch stroke urgent so this rod will extend out 12 inches and the max capacity on this one is 225 pounds in the stand up test that I'm building I have two of these things that move the desk top up and down it has a max load capacity of 450 pounds which is more than enough that I need for that desk in this particular actuator over here it's the same exact make and model as this one the only difference being this is a 20 inch stroke whereas this is a 12 inch stroke so if you start looking for these what you'll find is that there's a ton of different manufacturers and suppliers that make these and they make them in all sorts of different configurations and all sorts of different price points and it kind of makes your head spin I tested several different manufacturers and suppliers that were all in I guess the lower end of the price range and I ended up landing on a company called windy nation they manufactured these two to move solar panels on rooftops and basically track the Sun as the Sun moves across the sky and obviously I'm not using it for that I'm using it for furniture but it just turns out that for my particular application these are perfect they were one of the few suppliers that I found that actually make these in black and I really like the black finish on them I think they go really well with the furniture most of the different suppliers and manufacturers that you'll find these are in silver and I tested a few of those and you know this the silver didn't really bothered me too much but what did bother me is that the ones that I did test ended up being in my opinion too loud in even though like if you just look at the spec sheet the spec sheet on this one I think it's like 40 or 45 decibels somewhere in there with other similar manufacturers will have the same exact specs but I still found these to be slightly quieter than some of the others that I tested anyway you might be wondering what in the world is this board well we were just at the Twin Cities Maker Faire and we were teaching eight nine ten year old kids how to wire up linear actuator so if they look really complicated and difficult if if an eight-year-old can do it my guess is you could probably do it too it's it's really really simple we put this board together I didn't do all the artwork on there my wife did all the artwork so you can thank Casey for that so anyway let me let me just show you really quick how this works these are 12-volt DC so if you have a 12 volt power source that's all you need to run these so you can run them off up I have a 12 volt battery right here you can run them off a car battery you can run them off a 12 volt power supply but I will show you both ways here I just realized that there's a bad connection in here so the first time they hooked it up it didn't work but now that I know that there's bad connection in there we can wiggle it around and it will work I promise you so we have our 12 volt battery here I have the red wire connected to the positive terminal on the battery and I'm gonna wire that into the red wire or the positive on the actuator and then I'm gonna take the black wire or the negative on the battery and wire that to the negative or black terminal on the actuator and as you can see it's not doing anything right now because the actuator has already retracted all the way so it can't go any further there's there's a limit switch inside there so once once it reaches its maximum retraction it hits that limit switch internally and it cuts the power and so it doesn't do anything so to make it go the opposite direction what we need to do is change the polarity so all we need to do is change the positive to the negative and the negative to the positive so let's go ahead and do that up here so I'm going to move the black wire that's a negative terminal of the battery hook that up to the red or a positive wire on the actuator and do the reverse with the positive to the negative and as you can see that moved the actuator up so anytime we want to reverse the direction of the actuator all we need to do is reverse the polarity but obviously we don't want to rewire and do that manually every time so to get around that that is where we use our toggle switch so on the board here I have a this is what we call a double pole double throw rocker switch this one in particular when you push the button down it stays down until you put it back in that middle position I think they call it a continuous rocker switch but I have another switch right here which looks identical but internally it's different and so this is what I normally use on with bridge furniture is what they call a momentary double pole double throw switch so when you push the button down it automatically comes back up as soon as you let your finger go I tend to use these more than this type just because what with this if you if you toggle it the the axe graters gonna keep moving until you manually do that so for safety reasons it's better to use the momentary rocker switch as soon as you let go or you know if you fell down or something like that it's not gonna keep moving so just for safety reasons it's better to have a momentary switch these switches in particular they have something that it's slightly unique about them these particular switches both the one on the board here and the one that I'm holding in my hand they're both pre-wired to reverse the polarity for you so you can see on the back of this switch how there's this terminal on the lower right side that's connected to the upper left terminal and the upper right is connected to this lower left terminal so it kind of makes that next pattern on the back there and what that's doing is that's reversing the polarity when you toggle the switch so there's basically only four terminals here you connect your power to the top two and you connect your actuator to the middle two and that's all there is to it to wire up the switch with a normal double pole double throw switch they don't have those terminals connected back there usually there's just six open terminals and then you would have to manually or solder in your your wires like that as an X or connect the terminals somehow now I'd like to buy these switches already pre-wired this way just because I like to keep things simple and it's just a lot less fussing around with and there's four terminals so you hook your power you hook your actuator up and you're good to go so let's go ahead and wire up this actuator but instead of using the total battery this time we're going to use this total power supply that I bought off Amazon this particular one is a 10 amp power supply each actuator only pulls a max of two and a half amps so in theory with the stand-up desk I'm only using two actuators so I only need a 5 amp power supply as you can see this is a 5 amp it's considerably smaller than this 10 M so you just need a 12 volt 5 amp power supply to run two actuators for the desk if you're building the inversion chair there's three actuators in that chair so in that case you do need the 10 a power supply or something to happen so for this and we should have a little green light here when it comes on there we go and my red wire to the positive terminal on the power supply and the negative wire to the negative terminal if you remember we just need to wire the top two terminals to the power supply so I'm going to move positive and negative on there and now we just have the two middle terminals that I need to connect to the linear actuator and it doesn't matter the positive or negative here unless you want to reverse the direction so I'm just going to use two white wires hook it up [Music] as you can see it toggled down and now it goes in the opposite direction so this switch is reversing the polarity and that's all it's doing we basically have our 12 volt power supply that's wired into our switch which is wired into our linear actuator and that's it so that's really all you need if you had two different linear actuators that you wanted to run in tandem together you would basically just wire up both linear actuators to those two terms those two middle terminals on the switch and as long as the load is the same on both actuators they should raise and lower at the exact same rate it might not be perfect but it should be close enough to where it's not an issue at least with our application with the furniture if for some reason you did get an actuator that is a lot slower than another actuator that is a situation where you might want to use a speed controller that's what this is down here all the speed controller does is it allows you to control the speed of one or more actuators in the case where you have two actuators that you want to be perfectly in sync with each other I like I said in most cases they should be in sync but if you get one that is slower than the other you can pick up one of these speed controllers and wire it into the faster actuator and that way all you need to do is turn this knob and you can slow down the faster one to match the speed above the slower one and so once you get that knob dialed in it will be there should be perfect in sync with the other one so let's go ahead and wire this one in what I'm going to do is just remove the power from the switch and instead of going to the switch I'm gonna go to these these two power terminals on the speed controller these you can't get the polarity messed up so the positive on the power supply needs to go to the pause terminal on the speed controller and the negative terminal of the power supply needs to go the negative so those two red wires are wired in there the two yellow are the output for the actuator go grab two more wires here and I'm gonna wear the yellow output wires that are on the speed controller to the power terminals that are on the switch we're just wiring this in line in the circuit the same way that we had a wired up before so instead of the power going directly to the top two terminals now we're wiring a speed controller into it so the output of that is going back into the input on the switch so now when I flip the switch you can see that actuator is moving really slow and then I can turn the knob and speed it up so that's really all there is to it you just have your power supply in your switch and your linear actuators and that's all you really need in extreme cases you might need a speed controller but in most cases I'd say that you probably don't just make sure that your power supply is rated for the number of amps that you're pulling through the system so keep in mind that each linear actuator pulls up at a max two and a half amps so if you're running two actuators you want a power supply that is a 5 amp power supply at least if you're running 3 or 4 actuators you should go with the 10 amp power supply also make sure that the switch that you're running is also rated for the number of amps that you're pulling through the system in this particular case this is a 30 amp switch which is nowhere near the number of amps that I'm pulling through the system so that's a perfect switch for this application so so anyway as soon as that desk finishes drying I am going to take this box of brand new linear actuators and I'm going to install them in that desk that will be in my next video so I'm gonna go ahead and put links to all of the components that's on this board in the description of the video and hopefully this was helpful for you guys and won't check you guys later [Music]

Channel: Tommy Tompkins

Views: 623,661

Keywords: linear actuators, linear actuator, woodworking, furniture design, standing desk, sit stand desk, diy standing desk, linear actuator projects

Id: hpZl77cYBxo

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2018