Well, yesterday’s voyage to various Silicon Valley surplus locations didn’t yield many very many good buys, so my robot project is still proceeding rather slowly. I did pick up some alligator clips and scavenged the batteries out of my maglight, and gave them a test. Voila!, and and in reverse. Somewhere I heard that these motors were asymmetric, and ran at a different speed in one direction compared to the other, but as you can see, it’s pretty close. I don’t think I’m going to worry about it.

At 4.5 volts, the motors run somewhere around 40 rpms and pull about 1.5-1.7 amps. They also run pretty quiet, so I don’t think I’ll have many problems with noise.