L298 Motor Driver


Materials List
1) L298 Motor Driver - All you need is the kit.
2) Microcontroller and a way to program it - I used a PIC18F6722 dev board. This is optional since you can test the motor driver without the microcontroller.

Design details
This kit requires soldering. The motor driver comes with excellent directions and works great. It supports motors that draw up to two amps of current which is way more than I need right now, but extra power overhead doesn't hurt anything. The only downside I've seen is that it takes 5 output pins on the micro controller. I'm seeing a lot of these devices use a lot of output/input lines. I'm already thinking about creating a generic I2C control module that would allow for easy control of these sorts of devices, but I probably won't get around to doing that until I have a robot with a microcontroller that runs out of pins.

Here is the souce code: source code
Here is the circuit diagram: L298 Motor Driver Circuit
Here are some pictures: Pic 0, Pic 1, Pic 2

Please email any questions/comments/errors to robots@glacialwanderer.com.