Has anyone used the dual serial motor controller PICs with L298 H-Bridges?
Any gotchas that you could share ?
Sorry for the lateness of this reply. I hope you have e-mail notification turned on, if you’re still interested.
I have used the Pololu serial motor controllers, which use said PIC, and I just recently used some L298 H-Bridges in a completely separate project, but they should work fine with each other.
You should look at the circuit schematic in the SMC01a’s user guide:
https://www.pololu.com/products/pololu/0101/smc01a_user_guide.pdf
to figure out the pin to pin connection. As in the SMC01a circuit, you are going to want to hold the “enable” pins of your L298 high all the time. And funny you should ask, there is a “gotcha” that got me twice, once for each H!
The two “Current Sensing” pins on the L298 are part of the path from power to ground through each H. If you wanted to you could put a (small) resistor from each pin to ground, and measure the voltage drop across the resistor to, well, sense the current each H is carrying. If you don’t care to measure the current, you must ground both of these pins, in addition to the “Ground” pin on the chip.
-Adam