I am new to Arduino and have recently started on my first serious project I am making an automatic plant watering system which will water the plants at a fixed time every day say 10 am and then put the Arduino in sleep mode for 24 hours. I have a Freeduino with Atmega168 and have purchased a 6V DC water pump as well. Now since this is going to be a portable project i.e. no access to wall wart or USB power I'm working on the power supply part and motor control part.
I plan to start and stop the motor by following this tutorial at Adafruit using a transistor and diode. Breadboard Layout | Arduino Lesson 13. DC Motors | Adafruit Learning System I have one question about the breadboard layout given on the above URL. On that page they have mentioned that the motor provided by Adafruit draws only 250mAmps. Since my water pump will draw much more current can I power it from a different battery pack? I mean can I keep all wiring same as shown on the URL except the voltage provided to the motor and ground, instead of coming from Arduino can they come from a seperate battery? Will that work?
Tbh in this situation i'd use one of the motor shields available for arduino boards, you can put separate power too them and they make programming the motors easy too! I built an autonomous vehicle using the shield and it was excellent http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoMotorShieldR3
@dantyas,
We are all here to help, but when someone has posted twice on the same topic, we normally wait till they have removed one thread before we start making suggestions. Your suggestions are surly appreciated, but lets wait to see which thread remains to work on. Thanks, Jack
Thanks everyone for the replies, I will work on these details! Also apologies for posting twice on the same topic, it happened by mistake. I even tried to delete one of the threads but got a error message like "you are not allowed to delete your own post"! And I didnt know whom to contact in this situation. But i will take more care in future.