Since motors consume voltage and current that cannot be supplied by the GPIO pins alone, we opt for motor drivers. These have an external power supply and use the microcontroller's GPIO pins to receive the control signal. Based on the control signals received, the motor rotates at a particular speed. There are lots of motor drivers available on the market; we will be concentrating on L293D initially, and then a custom and a high-power driver.

The target of any motor driver is to receive control signals from the controller here, the Intel Edison, and send the final output to the motor. Typically, a motor driver can rotate the motor in both directions and also control the speed.