how to plug in a motor

[geek1]

can anyone tell me how to connect a motor to a Roboduino?

[jamort]

servo or dc?

[geek1]

DC

[HDL_CinC_Dragon]

Do you need to be able to control the motor any more than just turn it on or turn it off? Or do you need to know how many times the motor has rotated and all that good stuff?

[geek1]

Never mind guys, I found a continuous rotation servo form solarbotics and will be using that instead.

[Ro-Bot-X]

To use a DC motor with the Roboduino or any other microcontroller you need a device that will be able to give the motor the amount of power it needs, that is a lot greater that what the microcontroller can output. This device is called a Motor Driver or H-Bridge. It can be a simple integrated circuit (IC) or can be built using transistors or better MOSFETs. For a beginner it is easyer to use an IC like L293D or SN754410. This IC is a dual H-Bridge, that means it can drive 2 DC motors. If you find it hard to read a schematic and solder the IC on a piece of veroboard, you can buy the Secret Motor Driver that can replace the electronics inside a standard servo motor so you'll have a geared DC motor with a built in motor driver.

Read the PDF file to see the many ways you can use this simple motor driver - inside a servo, on a breadboard, on a geared DC motor and some ways to use the control pins with the microcontroller of your choice.

Here are the links:
http://www.solarbotics.com/products/k_smd/
http://www.solarbotics.com/assets/documentation/kit10.pdf

[Webbot]

Also see Motor Driver tutorial at http://www.societyofrobots.com/member_tutorials/node/159