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FEATURE
Raspberry Pi Electronic Fun Part 7
Using a Transistor to Turn a DC Motor On/Off
Issue: 22.3 (May/June 2024)
Author: Eugene Dakin
Author Bio: Eugene works as a Senior Oilfield Technical Specialist. He has university degrees in the disciplines of Engineering, Chemistry, Biology, Business, and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. He is the author of dozens of books on Xojo available on the xdevlibrary.com website.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 11,830
Starting Page Number: 66
Article Number: 22305
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project22305.zip Updated: 2024-05-03 11:26:58
Related Web Link(s):
http://abyz.me.uk/lg/lg.zip
Excerpt of article text...
Using a Transistor to Turn a DC Motor On/Off
The Raspberry Pi can deliver a small amount of current and voltage to power light circuits. Using the internal power of the Raspberry Pi to provide too much amperage or voltage to a motor can cause issues such as: 1) destroying a chip on the Raspberry Pi motherboard, 2) cause the power surge to reboot the Raspberry Pi, or 3) corrupt the OS or program due to low voltage. The way to prevent this from occurring is to use a transistor.
A transistor is a switch, where power can be from a larger power supply, such as a battery, and can be controlled through a light power source from the Raspberry Pi Board. This means that the Raspberry Pi board only needs to supply enough power to turn the transistor-switch on or off, and all of the heavy work is provided with a battery and a motor which makes the workload on the motherboard very easy.
NPN Transistor
An NPN transistor can be used as a switch. When the voltage of the base is above about 0.6-volts and the emitter is negatively charged (usually to the negative side of a power supply), then the transistor allows the circuit from the Collector-to-Emitter to flow (see Figure 1).
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