Controlling motor speed

Community General Discussions
1

Is it possible to control the motor speed through programming with a picaxe board? or do i have to buy the motor with the speed i want?

2

Check out this tutorial.

Check out this tutorial.  It is for Arduino but should be very similar to the picaxe.  

http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-15-dc-motor-reversing

It shows how to use an H-Bridge chip and control speed on a motor. The chip they show in this tutorial is only good to 0.6 amps (I think that is the spec on it) so may not be appropriate for your situation.  If you can tell us what motor you have, what you are trying to do and what you have done so far we can give more concrete recommendations that will address your situation.

Good luck. 

Regards,

Bill

 

 

3

You can buy a DC motor with

You can buy a DC motor with a specified speed, and run it slower in a few ways.

To reduce the speed of a DC motor, you can:

  1. Reduce the voltage you apply to it (which reduces the current).  May not be good to run DC motors at a voltage too low  below their operating range, but I’m not sure on that.
  2. Use Pulse-width modulation (PWM) to reduce the average current through the motor windings.  This is your typical microcontroller based speed control.
  3. Use some nifty motor driver boards or ICs.  Pololu.com has some good examples.  This will cost you more but may make it easier (or more difficult) depending on your setup and knowledge.

I’m not going to dive into using other types of motors, as you didn’t specify which type of motor you want to drive.

I’m sure if you tell us the basic part of what you want to do we can help even more, so give us some feedback :slight_smile:

Cheers