How to use the Make:DC Motor Driver Board

In order to use the Make:DC Motor Driver Board, you will need a source of the digital signals (the examples use the Arduino microcontroller board, but many other microcontrollers would work equally well, or even a PC parallel port.)  You will also need some connectors- we like to use female headers that have been cut carefully into pairs with a razor saw, and soldered short lengths of wire, and protected with little sleeves out of heat-shrink tubing.)

With your connectors, you can connect the microcontroller to the motor driver board.  One of the unusual features of this board is that it makes use of the 5v regulated supply for both the logic power and the motor power.  This simplifies things a lot for a small robot, and will work well if the demands by attached motors are not too great.

Connect the V+ and G pin to the microcontroller V+ (no more than 6v) and Ground respectively.  Then connect the direction (D) and power (P) pins to a pair of pins on your microcontroller.  Now connect the appropriate motor pins to the two motor leads. Note that the top Power/Direction pins on the Driver Board go to the bottom Motor pins.  See the diagram below for an illustration of how they fit together.

You can also connect a second motor using the same basic approach.  Once the connections are made, you will need to program your microcontroller to use the driver board.  By taking the "power" pin high, the associated motor will start to turn in the direction set by the "direction" pin.  If your microcontroller or you programming chops allow, you can use pulse width modulation (PWM) to regulate its speed, too.  If you use the Arduino, you can look at the demo program located in the "Tools" folder, or directly from here.