Hello! So you’re interested in motors, we are too! Welcome to the MIT Electric Vehicle Team’s ‘Motor Lab’ and our open-source motor design and control knowledge center! It would be prudent of us to not explain the goals and structure of this notebook before we get started.
#1
First, and foremost. We’ll be informal. We want you to feel like you can email us, reach out to us, text us, call us, or whatever your preferred method of communication is. The reason for this is we are no experts in motors and motor control we aren’t bad, but we’re learning too (you never stop learning). And a knowledge base like this only benefits when you all ask question, reach out, and contribute! If you’re confused, someone else probably is too! That means we might be able to do better at explaning something, feel free to challenge us in that way, or feel free to send us a better explination! We will put it on this website free of charge, full credits to you. If you have a blog or website, well we’ll link that too if appropriate.
#2
Second, we heavily subscribe to the ‘tell it to me like I’m a five-year-old’ teaching methodology. We’re interested in robust understanding, and practical application. We never mean to be condescending, but if our tone feels that way in certain parts of explinations, our logic is because we assume very little knowledge going in. Please reach out, and we will strive to fix it.
#3
Third, there are many uncompiled, and unorganized resources for motors on the internet. Our goal is to organize these resources in a way that makes sense, and add to them when necessary. Our goals are to provide a “central knowledge base,” which means we may link to videos or external sources that can explain things a little better than we can. Especially if our explination would be just re-creating theirs. Credit will always be given, and we will never claim ownership over anything we do not produce. The idea here is also to build a community and have the amazing people on the internet be recognized for their work.
#4
Fourth, we will strive to teach using the principals of learning psychology. Often times, the psychology of learning doesn’t make it into engineering teaching for various reasons. We hope to fix that and provide methods for robust learning. Additionally, we hope to teach students and professionals to consider the impact of their work. Often times we focus on technology and not its impact as a society. We hope to change that, and we’ll discuss things like applications to the UN SDGs, and how we can use this technology to build a better world, not a worse one.
#5
Fifth, every single thing on this website is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Which means you can use it for whatever you want, but please provide credit where credit is due, and keep it open source for others. When citing work released by us, please refer to the following style guide. We ask that you include a link to the original work, a link to our website, and a link to creative-commons.
1
[Title of Work](hyperlink) by the [MIT Motor Lab](https://motors.mit.edu) is licensed under a [CC BY-SA 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
When citing work by us published in journals, conferences, or similar please refer to the citation requirements for the scientific formats associated with those journals.
#6
Finally, we will constantly strive to keep this site as up to date as possible. This may be difficult at times, we’re a group of students, researchers, and teaching staff at MIT. This is not our full time job, but we do think it’s important. That being said, if you see something you’d like on here. Reach out! There’s rarely a point we’ll say no, though it may take some time occasionally.
Reach out anytime motors@mit.edu!