L293D Dual H-Bridge Motor Driver: Equ Equ Equ Org Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall SJMP
L293D Dual H-Bridge Motor Driver: Equ Equ Equ Org Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall Acall SJMP
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.
A simple schematic for interfacing a DC motor using L293D is shown below.
As you can see in the circuit, three pins are needed for interfacing a DC motor (A, B, Enable). If you
want the o/p to be enabled completely then you can connect Enable to VCC and only 2 pins needed
from controller to make the motor work.
As per the truth mentioned in the image above its fairly simple to program the microcontroller. Its
also clear from the truth table of BJT circuit and L293D the programming will be same for both of
them, just keeping in mind the allowed combinations of A and B. We will discuss about
programming in C as well as assembly for running motor with the help of a microcontroller.
BJT H-Bridge
A simple H-bridge can be made with the help of Power BJTs like TIP31 and TIP32. An example and a
working demo of this circuit is shown in the figure below.
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.
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.
Similarly, when you switch on low side left and high side right, the current flows in opposite direction
and motor rotates in backward direction. This is the basic working of H-Bridge. We can also make a
small truth table according to the switching of H-Bridge explained above.
Truth Table
High Left
High Right
Low Left
Low Right
Description
Truth Table
High Left
High Right
Low Left
Low Right
Description
Off
On
On
Off
On
On
Off
Off
Off
Off
On
On
As already said, H-bridge can be made with the help of trasistors as well as MOSFETs, the only thing
is the power handling capacity of the circuit. If motors are needed to run with high current then lot
of dissipation is there. So head sinks are needed to cool the circuit.
Now you might be thinkin why i did not discuss the cases like High side left on and Low side left on
or high side right on and low side right on. Clearly seen in the diagra, you don't want to burn your
power supply by shorting them. So that is why those combinations are not discussed in the truth
table.
So we have seen that using simple switching elements we can make our own H-Bridge, or other
option we have is using an IC based H-bridge driver. Both of them are discussed in the next section
of the tutorial.