I've been working on E-spinner designs of late, partly becasue it seems strange that so many of them lack a foot pedal speed control and partly as a way to practice spindle-like mechanical systems.

The first one was fairly simple but could do scotch and irish tension, had a wired pedal, and arranged the spool and flyer cantilevered from a support, with a non-moving orifice held out in space in front of them. This proves reasonably successful and makes it easy to access the spool.

The second expands upon this, and will have both a motor and encoder for both the spool and flyer (and have electrical selection between tension modes), and hopefully have a level winding feature.

This spinner has grown somewhat in scope, and now has three motors; one of which controlls the flyer, and two control the spool with an arrangement related to Mecanum wheels; two supports hold a central shaft (which is a plain round metal rod, to allow arbitrarily long rods to be swapped into the device without a redesign) with a triple of oppositely-angled rubber rollers; if both supports rotate at the same rate, then the rod only rotates, but if they rotate opposed then the rod only translates. Intermediate states produce combined linear and rotational motion.

This with a spool rigidly attached to the rod and combined with a fixed flyer produces the level-winding action.

Initially this was assembled with inexpensive DC motors, but especially with a 3d printed frame this produced annoying levels of noise; I've been exploring brushless DC motors with sinusoidal control and have an initial design out for manufacting, rubber mounting systems between motor and frame, and simply filling the printed part with plaster or another solid mix. Once I have a solution I'm happy with to the noise issue this will be easier to progress on.