I dont' know all that much about power drivers and neither do you (most likely)! All we want is some kind of muscle behind our outputs. We want our digital outs to do logic levels or higher voltage if need be, drive motors, drive long wires, pump out current like mad, drive high power electrodes (in my case) and just basically kick butt on the circuit board. And as long as the application is not overly high performance in some aspect, we would like it if this were as simple as possible - a no brainer please!

Well I have one way to meet that need. It's not the solution for everyone, but it is at least a FAST solution in that it can provide what is needed with no muss, no fuss, and as little brainology as necessary! What I am going to do is take the 12 unused digital outputs (pins 0 and 1 are used for USB communications, so that's pins 2 thru 13) and put three SN754410 motor driver chips on them.

Each motor driver is capable of driving four outputs from four inputs, has diode protection to prevent inductive spikes from going zappy zap zap with our precious circuitry, and offers thermal protection. We can use our digital outputs, PWM outputs, and tone outputs with nary a concern (to my knowledge). We'll just tie the enable pins high, make one output votage pin available, and shoot from the hip!

As to the analog inputs, they are typically used to sense what the heck is going on on the circuit board and we've just introduced the capability of driving up to 36Volts on the outputs, so there be some high voltage juice running around in these here parts, just the thing to take out an unsuspecting arduino board! So what's the answer? Why, simply add diode protection to the inputs! put a little R in there and a pair of D's on each input and you got yourself some safety margin!

And that's it. I'm going to make this simple, quick, and easy for all of us. Remember: no brain, no pain! If you want to get into fancier stuff you are certainly welcome to do so and improve upon what is done here, but I'm going to simply do a breadboard version that is transferrable to a solderable protoboard with breadboard patterns, and then maybe make a PCB or a few PCBs and call it a job well done. Stay tuned for details.

Les