mouse trap motor

I am making an advanced mouse trap and am running into some problems with the motor. I have no idea what kind of MOSFET I need. I bought an IRF520 and am reconsidering whether that was a good idea. I have no idea what the model of the motor is. Please help. this invention is for a grade at school.

What will be driving the mosfet? IRF520 is not a logic level mosfet because it is designed for 10V gate drive rather than 5V. So it is not really suitable for driving directly from an Arduino or other microcontroller. However, if the motor is small and needs less than 1A current, then it may work OK.

Don't forget to connect a flyback diode in parallel with the motor.

Sounds like you need to do a little more research into what you really need to do to make this work. What are the motor specs? What voltage are you running things from? We would be able to give you some pointers -IF you gave us some usable info.

Remember - you have to do some work before we can help you. We don't have the parts in our hands to evaluate or test. And we aren't getting the grade, so we do expect you to do the work.

thanks guys
that should help. Just one more thing. What does the flyback diode do?

The motor is an inductive load, so when the motor stops, the negative terminal will let of high voltage that can potentialy damage your MOSFET or Arduino, the diode prevents that.

thanks

How many volts does the motor use? Maybe IRF540N will work.
PS this is how you attach a flyback diode. Just replace the relay with the motor
Imgur

And how do you detect the mouse?