Interfacing Arduino with RC Car's H-Bridges

Forum 2005-2010 (read only) Hardware Interfacing
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See Below :wink:

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Hello,

I thought it would be fun to resurrect an old RC car from my childhood.

I want to use the existing dual H-bridges that are on the circuit board off the car, but I'm not entirely sure what is going on, I'm a mechanical engineer and have not had a lot of experience with this sort of thing.

Here's a picture of what I'm working with:

1024×768 107 KB

I have removed all the old receiver components that were on the board but have left the motor controller portion. The controller had four leads, two for each H-bridge, that went into some sort of integrated circuit (Taiyo 93-R). Here's a layout of one of the H-Bridges, I'm 95% sure the resistivities are correct however some of the bands were pretty faded.

The two leads that say "To Arduino" originally went into the integrated circuit, other than that there was nothing else connected to this section of the board, other than a capacitor between the +6V and ground.

My hope is to have an Arduino control these H-Bridges instead of the IC, however I don't know where to go from here.

I googled what was on the transistors and am pretty sure the following is correct:

A, C: NPN - C3420 GR
B, D: PNP - A1357
E, F: PNP - A950 Y 6H

So I guess my question is this, what kind of voltage/current do I need to input into these leads to control the H-Bridge?

Thanks!

-Marcus