27-06-2012, 10:58 AM
Interfacing DC Motor using H Bridge
Interfacing DC Motor.docx (Size: 30.99 KB / Downloads: 34)
Whenever a robotics hobbyist talk about making a robot, the first thing comes to his mind is making the robot move on the ground. And there are always two options in front of the designer whether to use a DC motor or a stepper motor. When it comes to speed, weight, size, cost... DC motors are always preffered over stepper motors. There are many things which you can do with your DC motor when interfaced with a microcontroller. For example you can control the speed of motor, you can control the direction of rotation, you can also do encoding of the rotation made by DC motor i.e. keeping track of how many turns are made by your motors etc. So you can see DC motors are no less than a stepper motor.
In this part of tutorial we will learn to interfacing a DC motor with a microcontroller. Usually H-bridge is preffered way of interfacing a DC motor. These days many IC manufacturers have H-bridge motor drivers available in the market like L293D is most used H-Bridge driver IC. H-bridge can also be made with the help of trasistors and MOSFETs etc. rather of being cheap, they only increase the size of the design board, which is somtimes not required so using a small 16 pin IC is preffered for this purpose.
►Working Theory of H-Bridge
The name "H-Bridge" is derived from the actual shape of the switching circuit which control the motoion of the motor. It is also known as "Full Bridge". Basically there are four switching elements in the H-Bridge as shown in the figure below.
As you can see in the figure above there are four switching elements named as "High side left", "High side right", "Low side right", "Low side left". When these switches are turned on in pairs motor changes its direction accordingly. Like, if we switch on High side left and Low side right then motor rotate in forward direction, as current flows from Power supply through the motor coil goes to ground via switch low side right. This is shown in the figure below.
►L293D Dual H-Bridge Motor Driver
L293D is a dual H-Bridge motor driver, So with one IC we can interface two DC motors which can be controlled in both clockwise and counter clockwise direction and if you have motor with fix direction of motion the you can make use of all the four I/Os to connect up to four DC motors. L293D has output current of 600mA and peak output current of 1.2A per channel. Moreover for protection of circuit from back EMF ouput diodes are included within the IC. The output supply (VCC2) has a wide range from 4.5V to 36V, which has made L293D a best choice for DC motor driver.