Description
Soldered on TB6612 onto a breakout board for you here, with a polarity protection FET on the motor voltage input and a pullup on the "standby" enable pin. Each breakout chip contains two full H-bridges (four half H-bridges). That means you can drive 2-4 solenoids (only two can be active at a time, on opposite bridges), two DC motors bi-directionally, or one stepper motor. Just make sure they're good for 1.2 Amp or less of current, since that's the limit of this chip. They do handle a peak of 3A but that's just for a short amount of time, like 20 milliseconds. What we like most about this particular driver is that it comes with built in kick-back diodes internally so you don't have to worry about the inductive kick damaging your project or driver!
There's two digital inputs per H-bridge (one for each half of the bridge) as well as a PWM input per driver so you can control motor speed. Runs at 2.7V-5V logic. The motor voltage is separate from the logic voltage. Good for motor voltages from 4.5V up to 13.5V! This wont work well for 3V motors.