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Here's the H bridge I'm building
It should have a DC motor but I'm using LED and a resistor instead for safety purposes.
(original)
so I'm connecting everything exactly like the sheet, but still not working.
The 10k resistors are doing not a lot because they are weak compared to the 1k resistors. So, when both switches are open the junctions of the 1k resistors are held at mid-supply, all the transistors are on and you have a shoot through situation.
Now close a switch and that side of the motor will be pulled to Vcc but both the transistors are still switched on on the other side of the bridge.
This circuit uses emitter followers instead of common emitter configuration in order to avoid shoot through.
Disadvantage of the transistors being driven in emitter follower mode is that there is more voltage dropped across them than in common emitter mode necessitating more heat sinking.
A few comments on breadboarding & prototyping.
I agree that having neat schematics & breadboards are helpful, particularly when you are first starting out.
However, some of the very best analog designers eschewed neatness. Robert Pease, the renowned analog designer (died in a car accident in 2011) from National Semiconductor and Philbrick, tended to have breadboards that looked more like this:
Image source: Electronic Design magazine - What's All This Analog Engineering Stuff, Anyhow?
Jim Williams who worked for Linear Technology Corporation was another analog guru known for his rats-nest bread boards.
I was considering making this a comment, but I think this works as an engineering insightful answer:
Sometimes a schematic can be as right as possible, the physical implementation can just be too far from reproducing the "idealizations" of a schematic that the resulting device just doesn't work.
In the case of cheap solder-free breadboard like yours: That idealization is probably the assumption that a connection on the breadboard is close enough to an ideal conductor, which the lines on your schematic are.
Breadboard contacting is notoriously unreliable. And your plugging and wiring looks especially flimsy and unreliable. I don't think, for example, that your switches and your resistors make reliable contact.
Get out a soldering iron and build this on perfboard. If you don't have perfboard at hand, build it free-flying. Still better than this breadboard – not even your fault, these things are just nightmares.
To drive the motor (in the one or the other direction), you have to turn on the pair of p-n-p and n-p-n transistors in the corresponding diagonal.
To do that, connect a network of 1 k resistor and push button in series between the bases of each diagonal pair of transistors. The resistor will serve as a common base resistor when you press the button.
Also, connect a 10 k resistor in parallel to each base-emitter junction to reliably cut off it when the base is floating.
EDIT: Only do not press both buttons simultaneously to avoid the short connection.
