Tinywrench controls motors with ATtiny24 chips

Tinywrench is [Tanjent's] take on a motor controller board. It aims to replicate all of the functions that a standalone motor controller chip offers at as low a cost as possible. Early results are in. It works, and as seen can be assembled for about $8.

The top of the device offers a terminal block for connecting motors, ground, and … Read the rest

Intro to DC motor control using the SN754410

So your electronic hobby skills are coming along quite nicely but you’re not very comfortable doing more than blinking a few LEDs. Now’s a good time to try something new by driving a couple of DC motors.

You probably know that you can’t just hook these up to the pins of your favorite uC and call it good. The … Read the rest

Reversible relay-based motor controller

[Nothinglabs] built this motor controller as an alternative to using an H-bridge. They call it the RAT controller which stands for “Relay and Transistors”. You can see above that two Darlington transistors along with their base transistors allow logic signals to switch the relay on and off, driving the motor in one direction or the other based on the … Read the rest

Electric spinning wheel

spinningwheel

[glacialwanderer], who you may remember from his CNC machine build, recently completed an electric spinning wheel. Spinning wheels are used by knitters to turn raw sheep’s wool into yarn. He went through several iterations before arriving at a good design. Besides the motor, there are two major components to the spinning wheel: the flyer and the bobbin. A … Read the rest

RepRap Motherboard

reprapmb-1

When the RepRap team found themselves pushing the limits of the Arduino, they started looking for alternatives. They found it in the ATMega644P. It has four times the memory and four times the RAM compared to the ATMega168 used in the standard Arduino. It also has 32 I/O pins. They ported the Arduino software to the microcontroller and started … Read the rest