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I am trying to build a robot and i have been having trouble getting a working h-bridge for my motors and i was wondering if anyone could help me work this out.

i have 2 motors to drive with either a pic or a c-stamp pwm. the motors are HG16-120-AA Operating Voltage 5.4v-6.6v Rated Current 350ma Stall Current 1600ma.

i have some irf530 and irf9630 power mosfets that i think will work for those motors but i am not sure as i have yet to have any luck getting it to work right.

i also have some irl510 mostfets if they would help?

i plan on driving the motors off 4 AA battery's

any help would be greatly appreciated

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It would help to see what you have already tried, ie schematic. – Kortuk Nov 21 at 8:08

5 Answers

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In many cases, building your own H-bridge out of discrete transistors is more work than you need to do. (See this page on H-bridge issues which also has an example schematic that would work with your FETs)

Instead, look into using one of the many H-bridge chips out there. These chips are designed to make quick work of controlling a motor and contain protection circuitry for both the motor and the power transistors. A really common H-bridge chip is the L293.

You can find a few examples of how to use H-bridge chips on the Arduino.cc site. For example, here's an example using an L293E H-bridge chip on a breadboard and here's Adafruit's Arduino motor shield kit which has four H-bridges (two L293Ds) on it.

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I thought I would include this for the people searching for H-Bridge stuff. Another good resource about h-bridges is at the Society of Robots site.

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I have an H-Bridge tutorial on Instructables. Its for Arduino but might still help you out. http://www.instructables.com/id/Duel-Motor-Driver-with-Arduino-using-a-SN754410NE-/

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Whatever you decide, I would recommend against using the "typical" H-bridge design with 4 transistors (FETS) as this can cause "shoot through" where you are shorting the power supply. This can cause major damage to both the power supply and your circuit (and some fire in the process).

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I will echo the recommendation of a pre-built H-bridge chip. Driving an inductive load with transistors carries many risks, and the L293 and friends carry circuitry to deal with transients and prevent latch-up.

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