Hey I would like to power 8 individual dc motor with variable speed and bidirectional. I've see some people use the l239d chip. But this seemed to only be able to drive two and needed 3 output wires per motor.
http://blog.whatgeek.com.pt/2015/03/arduino-l293d-dc-motors-control/
I also saw some one mention the TLC5940 chip but I'm not sure it could handle both directions.
The 8 dc motors are small something like this
Any ideas?
If you want to drive 8 motors at different speeds you will need at least 8 PWM signals. An Uno only has 6. A Mega has PWM on pins 2 to 13 and 44 to 46 (15 in total, I believe).
One advantage of the L298N is that it can drive a motor in either direction with a single PWM signal on the enable input. The other 2 connections don't have to be on PWM pins. Some other drivers (such as the Pololu DRVB8833) need two PWM outputs - one for each direction - which would mean 16 PWM pins for your 8 motors. The DRV8833 is a nice device if your motor needs 10v or less. I recently got some Toshiba TA8428K drivers for higher voltages. Like the DRV8833 they need two PWM signals. But, unlike the L298N they don't need external components.
I don't know anything about the TLC5940 but a brief Google suggests it is an LED driver.
...R
Thankyou I will look into it!
For lots of PWM Adafruit have a neat I2C controller PWM board - that might help, but you'll
still need lots of motor controllers - see if Pololu have some nice small cheap MOSFET drivers
that won't get hot?