Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Miniature servo drive

A miniature servo motor may require a voltage of 5V or less and current of 200mA.  An audio amplifier is ideally suitable to drive this type of motors.  It normally uses a bridge tied load (BTL) configuration, which makes H-bridge unnecessary.  It is capably of 1-2W into 4 or 8 Ohm speaker, so it can source and sink the required motor current and the bandwidth is more than adequate for a servo drive.  The National LM4866 2.2W stereo audio amplifier in the small TSSOP-20 package can drive two small motors.  It is likely to result in lower components and smaller footprint than other solutions.