The Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver is a tiny dual H-bridge breakout board based on the TB6612 chipset. The dual H-bridge can control two DC motors (bi-directional), step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper motor, or fire off two solenoids with 1.2A per channel. These are the same motor drivers used by the Adafruit Motor Shield and the Adafruit Motor HAT and are easy to work with.

Adafruit solders the TB6612 onto a breakout board for you with a polarity protection FET on the motor voltage input and a pullup on the “standby” enable pin. Each breakout chip contains two full H-bridges (four half H-bridges). That means you can drive 2-4 solenoids (only one can be active at a time on each of the two bridges), two DC motors bi-directionally, or one stepper motor. Just make sure they are drawing 1.2 Amp or less. The chip can handle a peak of 3A but that’s just for a short amount of time (around 20 milliseconds). The chip has built in kick-back diodes internally so you don’t have to worry about the inductive kick damaging your project or driver!

Logic level is 2.7V – 5V for motors/solenoids rated between 4.5V and 13.5V. The board ships mostly assembled; you will need to do some light soldering to attach the header to the breakout PCB.