Motor microcontroller

I recently came across an article by Roboteq named **broken link removed**.
It aims to build a PC-driven basic robot using their Roboteq controller.
While I was trying to gather the nessesary(typo) parts, I came across
the price tag of their AX2550 controller (their motor controller)- $490 dollars.
This was pretty out of my budget, and I tried to find alternatives:
* Controlling a "Dual PWM Driver for OOPic" **broken link removed** using I2C from my PC mainboard--
I wasn't sure if this can be accomplished without OOPic?
* Controlling the motors using BrainStem (note: all of them are in slave mode ofcourse)

or, plain and simple:
* Spending $490 over AX2550.


Any suggestions?


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I am sorry as I didn't notice that a Microcontroller forum exists.
Please delete this message.

Well, there are some really nice motor driver/controllers that I've seen on this site. All are under $20, and work pretty good. Here's the link:

**broken link removed**

There's also some other really good stuff on that site!

The devices under $20 will work for small loads (<2A maybe), I believe the controller mentioned in the original post handles over 100A per channel. Have you considered building your own h-bridge? That controller has lots of features, but you may not need them all.

Check out the prices for what you are comparing......
For $490 in one hand you have:

**broken link removed**

And for $20 on the other hand you have:

**broken link removed**

So what type of motors and what you want to do with them must be what you have to look at. For a simple small 'bot you can create and use one of the H-drive controlllers that handle less than 2AMPS (Max)... if you want to do battlebot type of thing you are going to buy or create a more powerfull drives. With a $20 motor controller you control a more or less $50-$100 motor. With a $490 driver you control $500-$1000 dollar motors. So it is all relative :lol:

Ivancho