Motor 1

So the other day I went out and bought a a couple of motors and servos to play with. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to play so today is the first day I got to.

I started off wanting to connect the motor to and h-bridge to let me run it in both directions but to do that I am told I need a capacitor and a diode which I unfortunately don't have. But I did have a transistor (NPN) so I could turn it on and off. To isolate the motor from the arduino I used an external power plug that is rated at 4.5V but when I tested it ran at 6.6V. The motor I got is actually a 12V motor but again, when I tested it the motor ran fine, if a little slow. So I wired everything up and found that I got.... NOTHING :(

So I started looking into why it wasn't working and it turns out that the transistor is chewing up too much voltage to run the motor (I think). When I measured the voltage coming out of the transistor it was only 3.3V. I'm not 100% sure about this because I also went and connected the power directly to the motor but with the multimeter in serial to the motor. It measured 6.6V but the motor still wouldn't run. So maybe its an amperage problem? I don't have any specifications on how much amperage the motor requires to run :(

~(' ')~