The concept

As we said, the basic idea behind a cyclone vacuum cleaner is that you have air entering in a container, usually from the top and near the edge of the container.

The air then goes spiraling down, and there it is extracted. The dust particles are being thrown out of the air flow by centrifugal forces, and remain in the container.  A filter at the entrance of the air extraction channel helps to keep the very fine dust particles.

This process does not keep ALL the dust inside the container. This is why on many commercial designs you can easily spot that a multi-stage design is implemented to optimize the dust collection.

Let's start!

When I started, a couple weeks ago, I had many plastic containers with a "snap-in" cap, from a previous project. They seem to fit well for a handheld vacuum cleaner.

Now we need a way to move the air. Quite powerful, so that we have a good air flow.

Where do we find a nice fan/blower unit with good power and reasonable price? From RC airplanes spare parts! They have good prices, have a lot of thrust (can move a lot of air) and are already designed to be battery powered, so our vacuum cleaner will be also cable-free. Wow!

I had an RC battery available, so after some research, I bought an ESC, a servo tester, and an EDF fan. The connection scheme is shown below.