Motor Control Circuits

Quick view of 2 Axis Solar Tracker Circuit

The sun trucker uses a combination of three photoresistors R7, R8 and R9, to ensure that the circuit will follow the sun during the day, but stop working at night time. Make this circuit 2 times to have 4 Axis move, by using 2 motors...

Motor Control circuit II

Motor Control circuit II

This circuit is 12 volt motors and lights well regulated. The scheme operates with PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). By IC1, a 555 is a square wave generated by a controllable duty cycle. This means that the width of the pulse is changed. The 555 sends a FET, a BUZ11, the tax on and off switches. Because the FET switches only and not as adjustable resistance works, he burned almost no energy. Also has more torque at lower engine speeds. If the motor current greater than 2A is T1 with D3 (think of the insulation) to a heat sink to be confirmed. To 2A this is not necessary. ..

Variable Fan Controller

Variable Fan Controller

When the fan seized up in my source and I changed it to a type with much less noise, turned on my computer, the largest source of noise CPU cooler fan. The computer I have a boxed Pentium III processor in slot 1, which is practically dismountable and fan replacement would be difficult. "Boxing" is a type of fan with ball bearings and replacement of the type of plain bearing to reduce noise, while cooling, but not reliability. Another option was to reduce the fan speed. I tried the program Speedfan. This enabled to set the fan speed, but I was unable to convince him to regulate the speed according to CPU temperature. ..

Single IC chip Motor Driver for robots

Single IC chip Motor Driver for robots

A motor driver! I'm sure you knew that already but that's what it is. A motor driver is required in pretty much all walkers including all of my CW series walkers. You need to use it any time you need to supply more current to the motors because the circuit can't supply enough. I like this one because it's very easy to build and pretty flexible on what you can do with it. Just find the (M) and take the two connections going to it and hook them to the inputs of the driver. Stack 'em up Q - When I hook my motor directly to the battery it has lots of power but when I hook it to the motor driver it doesn't and can't even move my walkers leg. ..

Suspended Bicore circuit for robots

Suspended Bicore circuit for robots

The bicore is the basis of advanced BEAM! Most intermediate to advanced BEAM robots are built off of the bicore. Uses go all the way from photovores to servo motor drivers to walkers to.... You get the idea. What it is is basically just an oscillator who's outputs go (+ - , - +, + -, - +....) and the rate of oscillations is controlled by the resister (R1). Another cool thing is that they can be grouped together to form large complex structures. Really a very cool circuit once you figure out how it works. R1 R1 controls the rate of oscillation. If you want quick oscillations you use a low value resister, long oscillations you use large value resister. I normally don't use values below 100K or over 10M, 1.6M is a common value...

Tactile sensors Motor controller

Tactile sensors Motor controller

It's basically a photovore with a couple tactile sensors. It's rather complex but can give neat behaviors with modifications to the circuit. At this point I don't have any plans to give more information on this circuit so your on your own. C1 and C2 values C1 and C2 are the capacitors that control how long each motor will reverse after the tactile sensor is triggered. Increasing the value will cause your bot to turn more after bumping an object. Decrease and it will turn less. The layout All resistors are 1M unless labeled otherwise. All capacitors are .22uF unless labeled otherwise. This circuit is more for advanced BEAMers so if your a newbie to BEAM I would recommend the iVore circuit. I may get some more info on the circuit on the web but no plans yet...

Solar motor driver for small robots

Solar motor driver for small robots

Since you can only use motors and coils with this circuit robots built with this circuit are mainly mechanical such as my artistic butterflies. One other common use is a little thing called a symet which can roam around and not get stuck using only one motor. The solar cell starts charging the capacitor and the voltage rises. As soon as the capacitor reaches around 2.7v the 1381 turns pin 1 high and turns the 3904 ON. When the 3904 turns on it brings the base of the 3906 low which turns it ON. With the 3906 ON current is supplied to the base of the 3904 which keeps it ON. Now current can flow through the motor and it turns. When the voltage gets down to .7v the transistors turn OFF and the process is repeated...

Motorised Infrared volume remote control

Motorised Infrared volume remote control

A nice circuit for using with audio preamplifiers, or any other circuit that use potentiometer and you need to control it from distance. The circuit includes Infrared transmitter and reciever with motor controller chip BA6418N...

PWM Fan Controller schematic

PWM Fan Controller schematic

The heart of the PWM Fan Controller is a PIC 12F675 microcontroller. This microcontroller is reading the analog output of a LM35 temperature sensor using a ADC (analog to digital converter) . The resulting digital value is converted to a temperature and a fan is powered proportionally to how hot the sensor is. The sensor is mounted against the hard drive chassis so it is measuring the actual drive temperature and not just the air temperature inside the housing. ..

DC 2 speed Motor Controller

DC 2 speed Motor Controller

The simplest of all motor controllers (besides a straight on/off switch) is the contactor controller. I designed this contactor controller for use in my electric scooter project. It is based around three 12V relays, two 12V batteries, two switches and of course a motor. Having no silicon to "fry", it is quite reliable and robust. A contactor controller works by rearranging the two (or more) supply batteries between series and parallel. This gives the motor a slow speed (batteries in parallel, current adds) and a fast speed (batteries in series, voltage adds). This assures that both batteries are discharged equally. When the circuit is "at rest", the batteries are connected in parallel, which allows easy recharging...

AC Motor Speed Control circuit

AC Motor Speed Control circuit

This AC motor speed controller can handle most universal type (brushed) AC motors and other loads up to about 250W. It works in much the same was a light dimmer circuit; by chopping part of the AC waveform off to effectively control voltage. Because of this functionality, the circuit will work for a wide variety of loads including incandescent light bulbs, heating elements, brushed AC motors and some transformers. The circuit tries to maintain a constant motor speed regardless of load so it is also ideal for power tools. Note that the circuit can only control brushed AC motors. Inductive motors require a variable frequency control...

Radio Control Motor speed Interface

Radio Control Motor speed Interface

The second half controls the steering. The mechanical design is a 3 wheeled caddy with the ´single wheel´ actually a closely spaced pair of wheels which are driven by the main drive motor top provide motive power (this is the motor controlled by the first circuit). However the pair are on a motorised swivel arrangement: this second motor is the steering and can rotate the pair through 180 degrees, thus providing not only the steering but also the direction control...

Motor controller with Analogue Opto Isolator

Motor controller with Analogue Opto Isolator

This is a circuit to use a standard, low quality opto isolator to transfer an analogue signal with reasonable linearity and without complicated feedback loops to monitor and linearise it. The circuit was designed to interface a mains driven thryristor motor controller to low voltage analogue circuitry. In this application you could isolate the thyristor controller with a transformer and earth one side of the motor, but you still have a potentially high voltage situation if there is a wiring fault or component failure. ..

Current sensing relay

Current sensing relay

The current to be sensed should flow from A to B. It flows either through R1 or (if big enough) through D1. There is an anti-parallel diode also present so the circuit can be used equally well for d.c. or a.c. sensing. With the relay off, Tr1 is not conducting so Tr2 must be. Therefore Tr1 must be off. This occurs (surprise!) at zero current. The 12v supply line will cause current to flow through R3 and R2 so a voltage {12x(R2+R1)/(R1+R2+R3)} will be developed on the base of Tr1. This voltage is 390 millivolts - enough to bring Tr1 near to turn on. Any voltage developed across R1 will add to this 390mV...

Motor speed controller using LM324

Motor speed controller using LM324

Most battery motor speed controllers are under manual control and the operator automatically adjusts speed to match demand. Under these conditions closed loop motor speed control is an unnecessary expense. However, when it is required, a tachogenerator can easily be added. True tachogenerators are usually expensive - which puts off most potential users. The expense is because they are very accurately manufactured and calibrated. They are also low volume items. However for most uses a small permanent magnet motor is perfectly adequate. It won't come with an accurate 'volts per rpm' calibration and it may (just possibly) drift over several years. For most purposes this simply does not matter!..