Motor Drivers

The L298N Motor Driver has been the recommended motor driver due to its low cost, reliability and versatility, but it has some drawbacks, mainly its inefficiency. High volt drops lead to significant power being wasted as heat, hence the large heatsink.

For the tracked Proxymow robot I have replaced the L298N with a pair of DRV8871s. These are also low cost, and benefit from MOSFET technology, so are much more efficient. This is an important factor when striving to mow a lawn on a single battery charge. In addition, the DRV8871 requires no software changes, so proxymow-mower code that worked with the L298N will still work with the newer driver.

There is no 5V power supply available for external use, so one drawback of the transition to DRV8871 is that we need a custom power supply for the general electronics (device, relay module, etc.).