C H A P T E R  5

Driving a DC Motor

Now it's time to control a DC motor. If you ever plan on building a robot or any moving device, the skills you are about to learn will be essential. Driving a motor requires currents higher than the Arduino can safely provide from its outputs, so you will need to make use of transistors to ensure that you have enough current for the motor and diodes for protection of the Arduino. The hardware overview will explain how these work.

For your first project, you will control a motor using a very simple method. Then you'll go on to use the very popular L293D Motor Driver chip. Later in the book, you'll learn how to use these to control a stepper motor.