That’s because brushless DC motors require carefully timed signals used in a process called Electronic Speed Control (ESC). [Fileark] built and ESC using an Arduino and has a couple of posts ...

En route to getting the off-the-peg DC-51 motor speed controller to ... zero at zero revs and gets more negative as speed increases. The variable speed set point is provided by the 10kΩ speed control ...

[Frank Herrmann] had an interesting idea to turn a geared DC ... motor rotation and listen on the ‘stepper motor driver’ interface pins hooked up to the motion controller upstream. The Arduino ...