Motor starter reduces the load, torque and current surge of a motor during startup. On starting, the motor takes more than five times the normal running current. This overheats the motor’s armature winding and creates a sudden voltage dip in the power supply, which can be avoided by using a motor starter. There are many types of motor starters. Here we describe an electronic DC motor starter using Arduino Uno board. This circuit controls both soft-start and soft-stop timings through pulse-width modulation (PWM). Circuit and working Circuit diagram of the DC motor soft-starter is shown in Fig. 1. In addition to Arduino Uno board (Board1), it uses PIC817 optocoupler (IC1), p-channel IRF9530 MOSFET (T1), 1N4007 rectifier diode (D1), 12V DC motor (M1) for testing, bi-colour LED (LED1) and a few other components. Fig. 1: Circuit diagram of DC motor starter using Arduino Uno Arduino Uno board is an important part of the circuit that generates PWM signals. Pushbuttons (S1 and S2) are used to ...