Barback relies heavily on pumps. Might even say they’re required. And pumps need motors. You can probably guess where this is going… motors need drivers.

In the early development of the pumps I wanted to use steppers but it seems I could not make them precise enough for the available torque. The decision was made to switch to gear motors, only in part because 8 matched Pololu motors fell into my lap (thanks boo!). With new motors we needed new drivers. After a couple of overly expensive and underwhelmingly performing tests I found the DRV8871 boards from Adafruit . These drivers checked all the boxes, simple, inexpensive and bidirectional. The only thing lacking, for me personally, was I really dislike screw terminals. And while Barback is going to continue using the Adafruit boards for the foreseeable future, I wanted to start work on a design for future projects, that use my favorite spring connectors.

Enter ezDRV v0.1

ezDRV v0.1 with all its mistakes

As is pretty obvious from the picture, at least on mistake was made. Due to a mistake in my 3d model of the connector propagating to the board design, the motor connected ended up flipped. Thankfully with its high clearance it can still work, just was all the wiring awkwardly pointed in the same direction.

This first batch will listed at a steep discount (and/or used in personal projects) while the second revision is being worked on.