Powering a Microcontroller and Motor Driver from One Power Source

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rhammell
 
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Joined: Wed Jun 27, 2012 6:41 am

Powering a Microcontroller and Motor Driver from One Power Source

Post by rhammell »

I'm working on building a two-wheeled bot, that uses n20 6V motors, and a Adafruit DRV8833 motor driver board, and an Arduino NanoESP32.

I'd like to power it from a single battery source, and for size limitiations, I'd like to use two 14500 3.7V batteries.

I'm looking for some confirmation that my planned wiring and understanding is correct (only power related wiring shown):

Image

- Two 3.7V 14500 batteries will produce 7.4V

- The batteries are connected to the VIN and GND pins of an Adafruit 5V Buck Converter.

- The 5V and GND pins from the buck converter are connected to the VMOTOR pins of the Adafruit DRV8833 Motor Driver board. This will provide 5V of power to the n20 motors (rated for 4.5V-6V nominal)

- The VIN and GND pins from the buck converter are conected to the VIN and GND pins on the Arduino NanoESP32. This will provide 7.4V of power to the Nano (which accepts 6-21V through its VIN pin)

My questionsn are:

- Will this wiring provide the correct voltages to the components (7.4V to the Arduino NanoESP32, and 5V to the Motor driver)

- Is the wiring from the buck converter to the Nano appropriate? The only other way I can think of to get the 7.4V from the battery to the Nano is to split the wire coming out of the battery holder to go to both the Nano and the converter. (The wiring of my project won't include a breadboard - all connections will be soldered)

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adafruit_support_bill
 
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Re: Powering a Microcontroller and Motor Driver from One Power Source

Post by adafruit_support_bill »

That looks like it should work. You could omit the buck converter entirely and limit the average voltage to the motors in your code by keeping the max PWM duty cycle to about 80%.

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