RecoveringTrekee
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- Aug 13, 2018
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I was thinking drive the motor with a single transistor. Should be pretty easy to find one that can drive the 200 mA and run at logic levels on the base/gate. You wouldn't need to reverse a vibrating motor ever, and you could always PWM from fimware pin if you had to control speed. Like you say though bigger thing is form factor. It's also easier to prototype stuff that is a little larger in my experience, since it's easy to solder by hand and the circuit boards are a little more standard and cheap.
I'm a EE and former embedded guy...
Design would be very easy -- as you and others said, you'd just need a microcontroller and whatever peripherals you wanted.
The one piece that hasn't been mentioned -- but that is very important -- is a motor driver. Most microcontrollers will output 25-50 mA current and 3.3/5V voltage at their pins, which isn't enough to drive most DC motors. A motor driver is simply a current amplifier (and potentially a voltage amplifier as well) that will allow you to increase the current (and voltage) to whatever is needed to drive the motor.
A motor that size probably requires 100-200 mA, and probably 3-5V.
For anyone that has done any basic embedded development, the circuits and programming should be very easy. The bigger issue is form-factor -- if you need a specific form factor for consumer deployment, you'll probably want to work with a company that provides that expertise.
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