> before you overcome the housings capacity to get rid of the heat. The thing is, most of these larger BJT parts were designed to be used with heatsinks, not u

> before you overcome the housings capacity to get rid of the heat. The thing is, most of these larger BJT parts were designed to be used with heatsinks, not usually standalone. IMHO, there's nothing wrong with dropping some voltage and dumping some heat. Sure, it isn't efficient, but if you size everything properly, and your project can accommodate the heatsink - then where's the problem? Heck, a long time ago you could get tiny heatsinks for some of the small round metal-can transistors that existed - I've got an old 16K minicomputer core-memory board from the 1970s that has drive electronics set up like this. The author of this "rant" mentions not using L298 (and presumably the L293) either - but there's nothing wrong with these parts for hobbyists (outside of the L298's weird footprint, and the fact that heatsinks for them are almost unobtanium) - provided that the limitations are kept in mind (finding a low-cost mosfet 4A h-bridge in a thru-hole design is virtually impossible). These parts were originally meant for automotive applications, where having a 12-14V large amperage battery supply was the norm (people trying to use them for circuits with 6V or less always wonder why their small motors won't turn).