Review on 🔧 Enhance Your Arduino Projects with Qunqi 2Packs Stepper Controller by Bobby Plymell

This product basically has one great advantage and a notorious disadvantage. First, the big plus of these motor drivers is their ease of use. Hook up a power supply and two small DC motors and this thing will do wonders. It had no problem driving the small 5V 0.20A DC motor that comes with the Arduino starter pack. AnalogWrite() had excellent resolution. I don't think these small motors draw more than 0.35A under load, so this motor driver seems to fit. A slight disadvantage of these motor drivers is the voltage drop from the source to the motor. The potential difference between the motor wires was almost 8V and the potential difference between the power supply wires was 12V. All of this is energy that ends up being wasted as heat, heating up the driver. The big disadvantage is the false advertising of electricity up to 2 amps. I have a slightly larger DC motor that draws 1.8 amps with no load (measured with a multimeter). Turning on this engine for about 10 seconds caused the L298N to get very hot, to the point where touching the radiator for more than a second would be painful. Naturally, the driver failed and thermally shut down after 15 seconds, reaching threshold operating temperatures. And this only if ONE of the two potential lines is involved. I tested it with a very large propeller acting as a cooler and the motor driver ran successfully for extended periods (30-60 seconds); this. The cooler does some work when forced convection is on. However, when I plugged in the second motor and about 4 amps went through this baby, it could only take about 5 seconds for the radiator to get too hot to even touch. I ran the driver with the specified specs anyway and it took 5 seconds before thermally shutting down, which means you have to wait at least another 30 seconds before turning it back on. If you want to run DC motors with this driver, I strongly recommend running motors that don't exceed 0.5A under load (especially if you're running two channels of it). If you exceed this value, the driver will overheat and crash. Invest more money for higher currents and get a better motor driver!