Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board

by Adafruit

Spin two DC motors, step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper, or fire off two solenoids with 1.2A per channel using the TB6612.

These are perhaps better known as "the drivers in the assembled Adafruit Motorshield or Motor HAT." We really like these dual H-bridges, so if you want to control motors without a shield or HAT these are easy to include on any solderless breadboard or perma-proto.

Adafruit solder 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 four solenoids, 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. 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.

Comes as one assembled and tested breakout plus a small strip of header. You'll need to do some light soldering to attach the header onto the breakout PCB. Arduino, motors, and power supply not included. Check out the handy tutorial on assembly and wiring!

TECHNICAL DETAILS

7 customer reviews

a year ago
Advertised as a stepper motor driver... but it's misleading. After failing to use it with a 5v, 5-wire unipolar stepper motor (which it is supposed to be able to do according to the provided documentation/examples), the provided circuit-python code cannot make the motor run in reverse, and/or it vibrates more than it spins... After digging into the issue, I found out that H-bridges are actually not recommended to drive stepper motors, because they do not provide current limitation. So it's very misleading for beginners such as me.
by Joël about Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board via REVIEWS.io
2 years ago
Fairly easy to wire up to a pi pico following the pinouts in the tutorial, and the example code only needed a little bit of tweeking for the board. I'm only running one 5v stepper motor so I'm not pushing the motor driver very hard, but it seems very reliable.
by Will about Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board via REVIEWS.io