Hello,
Can someone help me out? This will be my first Arduino project, and I need some help deciding what board to purchase.
I need the smallest form factor I can get to drive up to 10 vibration motors independently. I can use the 3.3v or 5v motors, doesn’t matter to be. Just need to be able to control them one at a time, and/or simultaneously.
Any ideas? I started searching around, but got confused with all the choices.
Thanks greatly in advance!
The Arduino cannot drive any motors. You need individual drivers for each one, but for a vibration motor, a single NPN transistor with base resistor, controlled by one port pin for on/off, will do for one motor. Alternatively you can use a logic level N channel MOSFET, one per motor. A kickback diode D1 is also required.
You will also need a separate power supply for the motors.
The transistors to control the motors and the power supplies must be able to supply the stall currents (locked rotor current) of the motors. Stall current is pulled, briefly, every time a motor starts. Stall current can be 10 times or more the running current. Stall current should be listed on the motor data sheet.
Thank you both for the info. So basically, I can just find the smallest Arduino that has 10 digital outputs, and the related parts you suggested, and I’ll be good to start shopping.
This is great, as my mind was leaning toward using relays, which would have taken up too much real estate.
Sorry if I seem green, which I am…is the motor depicted as the sideways M?
D1 is the diode…
What is C1?
R1 is 10K of resistance, but R2 is 180…no K or k?
Yes.
It is there to suppress the reverse high voltage that is generated when power is removed from the motor. Without the diode the transistor (MOSFET) will be destroyed by the reverse voltage spike.
The capacitor is used to shunt brush noise to ground and keep that noise off of the power supply. It is optional but is usually beneficial.
No K, just 180Ω. It is there to limit the gate capacitance charging current. It may of may not be necessary, depending on who you talk to. If I were building millions of something, maybe I would confirm its necessity, but as a hobbyist I figure why not, it's cheap so I always use one. If you do a search on this site you will find the debates (that no one has clearly won that I could tell).
Seriously, thanks a ton.
I’m in the low voltage field, so I get most of it, but this is another level!
So do you think I’d be good to start with this list? This for a wearable, a therapy device on a glove, so form factor needs to be small small.
Well that is a 3V3 device (that is a way of saying 3 point 3 volts) and you will have trouble getting a FET that will trigger fully from that voltage. I would go for the classic Nano as it runs on 5V.
That FET requires 5V to turn on so would not work with a 3V3 system.
It is also a bit of an overkill for the small current you need.
For a wearable device your biggest problem will be the power supply.
Awesome, thanks!
Any chance you could give me an idea on how to incorporate an led in parallel with each motor? So as when each motor is powered, a correlated led will light up? These motors may be running for 100ms - 1s
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