Do AFCI breakers interfere with any shop equipment?
The kinds of loads that are commonly associated with nuisance tripping of AFCIs are those with brush-type AC motors, called &quot;Universal&quot; motors, because you have AC power going across brushes to a commutator like a DC motor would, so the AC coming from the AFCI breaker is seeing the arcing taking place in that commutator, which has a similar profile to an arcing fault. So small kitchen appliances, vacuum cleaners, portable power tools and things like that which have little high speed motors will have these types of motors.
In a true DC motor with brushes, the AC supply system is buffered from the brushes via the rectifier that converts AC to DC, so the AC that is coming from the AFCI breaker is not seeing the arc directly. So things like Servos (which are often brushless now anyway), PWM controllers and drives, power supplies etc. all have that rectifier as a buffer and generally don't aggravate AFCI breakers.
But also, this issue of Universal motors causing nuisance tripping has been over blown to some extent. Over time, the AFCI breaker mfrs have been continuously improving the response algorithms of the little microprocessors inside of the breakers to reduce the nuisance tripping.