Can anyone point me in the direction of something like the L298 but is more efficient please.
Ideally I'd like to lose as little of the (approx) 12v input voltage as on output possible.
Thank you all,
Alan
Sure, http://www.pololu.com/ , offers many motor driver (some in arduino shield factor?) is many voltage and current levels and most utilize MOSFETs for the switching so don't suffer the voltage drop that the L298's bipolar switching transistors use.
Lefty
Anything except an L293D.... The problem is none of them
are cheap except for the surface mount chips. LMD18200T
I've used and its 0.3 ohm MOSFETs I think, for significantly
better performance Pololu have the co-packaged MOSFETs+driver
in the form of the VNH5019 and similar.
BTW the lower limit for integrated DMOS H-bridges is about 0.25 ohm
per switch, this is fundamental to DMOS process I think.
Discrete power MOSFETs go down to 0.001 ohm and below.
The VNH5019 has 4 MOSFETs and a driver chip co-packaged
(power MOSFETs use the substrate as the drain, so you need
at least 3 chips (the high switches can share substrate).
With good modern superbeta BJTs you can build a decent H-bridge
in the 1..5A range with low Vsat (< 0.3V) - however they are
nearly all surface mount.
see attached
MPC17510 H-BRIDGE MOTOR DRIVER.pdf (440 KB)
DRV8833 MOSFET MOTOR DRIVER CHIP.pdf (1.16 MB)
I'll see what's available. Thanks