TinyShield Dual DC Motor Board
The Dual Motor TinyShield allows you to drive two independently controlled DC brushed motors from your TinyDuino! Create your own tiny robots or drones! Using two of the super miniature but very powerful 2mm x 2mm TI DRV8837Motor Driver (H-Bridge) IC, this shield will allow for to 1.8A per channel and operate motors between 1.8 to 11V. This TinyShield includes a built in motor controller to make driving motors simple and uses the TinyDuino I2C interface - saving GPIO pins on the TinyDuino processor for other tasks, and an easy to use Arduino library is provided to control this.
Since this TinyShield uses I2C for communication, multiple Dual Motor TinyShields can be used on the same (up to four Dual Motor TinyShields), and there are resistors that can be changed to set the I2C address.
The board includes a bypass capacitors, as well as heatsinking the chips to a large plane on the bottom side of the board to help with heat dissipation. An external power connection is supplied to connect up to your motor power source (like a battery), and all the connections to the motors are with standard 0.1? spaced holes, that you can solder your motor leads into or use the supplied 0.1? headers. This shield is also available with JST connectors to allow easy connection to motors with this connection (future option).
The TI DRV8837 has one H-bridge driver consisting of N-channel power MOSFETs to drive a DC motor or one winding of a stepper motor, or other devices like solenoids. An internal charge pump generates needed gate-drive voltages. There are internal shutdown functions for overcurrent protection, short-circuit protection, undervoltage lockout and over temperature. The DRV8837 can supply up to 1.8 A of output current. It operates on a motor power-supply voltage from 1.8 V to 11 V .
Note: While the DRV8837 supports 1.8A @ 11V, we highly recommend operating under 500mA @ 5V per channel unless you have some really good heat sinking in place.
To learn more about the TinyDuino Platform, click here.