So I bought myself a couple of motors today at Radio Shack, however I'm not exactly sure how they would work to go backwards.
I'll be hooking them up to my picaxe once my motor controller gets here, but until then I'm just playing with them on my breadboard.
Does the controller change the current in order to make the motor go backwards? My motors only have two hookups, positive and negative, none for sending a signal to it.
Sounds like you have regular DC motors. The +ve and -ve are misleading. They might be better labelled A and B! The motor controller is what’s known as an H bridge. (Because the schematic looks like an H with the motor in the middle.) What it does for you is to reverse the polarity of the two output lines, so to get it to go “backwards” (a relative term), it connects the _ve voltage to the -ve terminal and vice-versa.
Just bear in mind that this doesn’t work for servos. For Heaven’s sake don’t connect them up backwards, or else all the special blue smoke will come out and it’s expensive to get a wee man to put it all back in again.
