How come my MOSFET was a "smoking", I thought it was rated high enough.

Other Hardware General Electronics
17

You want almost any n-channel MOSFET in TO220 package with
an "L" in the part-number.

MarkT showed a reasonable MOSFET driver ckt. It has an inverter 1st stage,
so the I/O pin works backwards, ie "1" output turns off the load.