I’m looking to connect this vibration motor (Shaftless Vibration Motor 10x3.4mm | POLOLU-1636 | Core Electronics Australia) to my raspberry pi pico. Just wondering how.
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Hey Will,
Thanks for posting on the forum!
This particular motor draws 120 mA max at ~3 V (2.5 – 3.5 V). As far as I am aware, the max output current of the Pico’s GPIO (all RP2040 variants) was designed for 3 mA, and usually “pops” at around 15-20 mA, essentially this just means that they’re only designed for signals or very low powered applications like powering an LED.
Interestingly, the max current for the GPIO doesn’t actually appear directly on the datasheet for the Pico:
Anyway, the short of it is that you need either a relay or a MOSFET to drive this motor off of a signal from the Pico’s GPIO. Should be fine to power it off of the Pico’s 3.3V output, as you can get away with about 300 mA off of it continuously.
This module would be perfect, but is currently out of stock unfortunately:
With a resistor between 1 kΩ and 10 kΩ , a little soldering and a protoboard you should be able to use a MOSFET for this directly. Here’s a short video that Jaryd put together recently that goes through how to do so in detail for you:
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Hi William,
Welcome to the forum 
Definitely check out that video Bryce linked, Jaryd just released that and it covers exactly how to do something like this. You can find the full written version of the guide here:
Just to throw another device into the mix this MOSFET driver module will also work for your project if you didn’t want to build something from basic components.
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