Chapter 15. Advanced Motors

In Chapter 14 we discussed how to use the AVR to drive big loads in the simplest, on-off case. Adding in PWM to the mix allows you to, for instance, vary the speed of a motor. That’s great, right? Now your little robot is going forward fast and forward slow. But what do you do when you want to put it in reverse?

In this chapter, I’ll introduce you to some useful concepts for more advanced motor-driving. The first step in all this is to build (or buy) a circuit that can reverse a DC motor by applying voltage to it in either polarity. Such a circuit is called an H-bridge, and I’ll go into detail about how you can build your own if you need to.

If you are only driving small motors, there is very ...

Get Make: AVR Programming now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.