Dual H-bridges - TB6612 - 4.5 to 13.5V @ 1.2A

TB6612 : DC Motor / Stepper driver supporting 1.2A current

The TB6612 from Toshiba is a full Dual H-Bridge component used to control two DC motors, one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper or four solenoids with 1.2A continuous per channel. This component is used on lot of motor driver boards including the Adafruit Motor Shield/HAT.

The TB6612 is soldered on a breakout board and haves polarity protection FET on the motor voltage input. The standby pin is also enabled with a pullup resistor (place it to ground to reduce the power consumption so ~20µA).

This is a strong dual H-bridges (or four half H-bridges) like the L298 but way more compact. With the 4 half-bridges you can drive up to 4 solenoids (only two can be active at a time, on opposite bridges). The dual H bridge can also controls 2 DC motors (bi-directionally, in the two ways) OR one stepper motor (where coils must be activated in a specific order).

Ensure that your motor power will not requires more than 1.2 Amp (since that's the limit of this chip for continuous current). The TB6612 can handle peaks up to 3A but for 10ms).

The great point compare to L298 is the internal kick-back diodes of the TB6612 protects the driver against the inductive kick that often damage project!

Each H-bridge use two digital inputs (to setup the spining direction) plus a PWM input (for speed control).

This component can be controled with logic voltage from 2.7V-5V (good for Arduino, MicroPython and Raspberry-Pi boards). As for any other H-Bridge, the motor voltage from 4.5 to 13V is feeded through a separate pin so you can drive motors from 5V to 12V (no possibilities for 3V motors).

Content

For each order, you will receive the board fully assembled and tested as well as a pinHeader.

You can solder the pinHeader on the board to use this board on a breadboard. This operation can be done in a minute.

Technical details

• Motor Voltage: 4.5 to 13.5V (15V max)
• Logic voltage: 2.7 to 5V (6V max)
• Current Limit: 1.2A (3.2A peak 10ms, 2A 20ms pulse with duty cycle < 20%)
• for 1 Stepper or 2 DC motor or 4 solenoids
• Thermal shutdown
• Low voltage detection circuit
• StandBy mode (15µA input current @ 3V logic)
• Weight: 1.8gr
• TB6612 datasheet (Toshiba, English)