Serial Controlled Motor Driver Hookup Guide

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Contributors: MTaylor
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Introduction

The Serial Controlled Motor Driver (abbreviated SCMD for the rest of this guide) is a DC motor driver that's been designed to drive small DC motors with ease. It can be commanded by UART, I2C, or SPI communication, and it can drive a constant 1.2A load per motor (peak 1.5A) at 11V. Need more than two motors? Chain multiple SCMDs together and command them through the same serial interface. Need more current? Each board's output can be bridged to allow double current.

SparkFun Serial Controlled Motor Driver

ROB-13911
1 Retired

This driver board was designed to be affordable, compact and have more features than previous versions of serial-controlled motor drivers. Its main advantage is the variability of drive levels making fine control adjustments a possibility.

Features:

  • 1.5 A peak drive per channel, 1.2 A steady state
  • Operates from 3 to 11 volts with 12v absolute max
  • 3.3v default VCC and logic
  • Max VCC in of 5.5v
  • 127 levels of DC drive strength.
  • Controllable by I2C, SPI, or TTL UART signals
  • Direction inversion on a per motor basis
  • Global Drive enable
  • Expansion port utilizing I2C, allows 16 additional drivers
  • Exposed TO-220 heat sink shape
  • Several I2C addresses, default UART bauds available
  • Bridgeable outputs
  • Optional fail-safe and diagnostics available.
  • Configurable expansion bus bit rate to 50, 100, or 400 kHz.
  • Configurable expansion bus update rate from 1ms to 255ms, or by command only

Covered In This Tutorial

This tutorial covers basic usage of the motor driver. It shows how to connect it to I2C, SPI, or UART at 3.3V levels, and how to attach more drivers to the controller and control them all independently. It also shows some common motors that can be used without heatsinks.

Required Materials

This tutorial explains how to use the Serial Controlled Motor Driver Breakout Board with an Arduino or direct serial. To follow along, you'll need the following materials:

Hobby Motor - Gear

Hobby Motor - Gear

ROB-11696
$2.10
4
Hobby Gearmotor - 140 RPM (Pair)

Hobby Gearmotor - 140 RPM (Pair)

ROB-13302
$5.50
6
Micro Gearmotor - 460 RPM (6-12V)

Micro Gearmotor - 460 RPM (6-12V)

ROB-12429
$13.95

Standard Gearmotor - 303 RPM (3-12V)

ROB-12147
1 Retired

Check out our entire offering of DC motors:


Suggested Reading

If you aren’t familiar with the following concepts, we recommend you read over these tutorials before continuing.

Serial Communication

Asynchronous serial communication concepts: packets, signal levels, baud rates, UARTs and more!

Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI)

SPI is commonly used to connect microcontrollers to peripherals such as sensors, shift registers, and SD cards.

I2C

An introduction to I2C, one of the main embedded communications protocols in use today.

Motors and Selecting the Right One

Learn all about different kinds of motors and how they operate.

Binary

Binary is the numeral system of electronics and programming...so it must be important to learn. But, what is binary? How does it translate to other numeral systems like decimal?

Logic Levels

Learn the difference between 3.3V and 5V devices and logic levels.

Bi-Directional Logic Level Converter Hookup Guide

An overview of the Bi-Directional Logic Level Converter, and some example circuits to show how it works.

Hexadecimal

How to interpret hex numbers, and how to convert them to/from decimal and binary.