Adafruit have this month unveiled an addition to their range in the form of a new HAT for the awesome Raspberry Pi that can help those of you that enjoy building projects controlled by the Pi, now control motors and stepper motors.
The new DC and Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry Pi is now available to purchase for $22.50 and has been designed to allow makers to construct their robotic dreams.
The new Raspberry Pi HAT is perfect for any motion based project and can drive up to 4 x DC or 2 x Stepper motors with full PWM speed control available to increase or decrease as your project requires. Adafruit explains :
“Since the Raspberry Pi does not have a lot of PWM pins, we use a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard to both control motor direction and speed. This chip handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C. Only two pins (SDA & SCL) are required to drive the multiple motors, and since it’s I2C you can also connect any other I2C devices or HATs to the same pins.
In fact, you can even stack multiple Motor HATs, up to 32 of them, for controlling up to 64 stepper motors or 128 DC motors (or a mix of the two) – just remember to purchase and solder in a stacking header instead of the one we include.
Motors are controlled by TB6612 MOSFET drivers with 1.2A per channel and 3A peak current capability, a big improvement over L293D drivers and there are built-in flyback diodes as well.”
Features of the new Pi HAT include :
• 4 H-Bridges: TB6612 chipset provides 1.2A per bridge (3A peak) with thermal shutdown protection, internal kickback protection diodes. Can run motors on 4.5VDC to 13.5VDC.
• Up to 4 bi-directional DC motors with individual 8-bit speed selection (so, about 0.5% resolution)
• Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil, interleaved or micro-stepping.
• Big terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (18-26AWG) and power
• Polarity protected 2-pin terminal block and jumper to connect external 5-12VDC power
• Works best with Raspberry Pi model B+ and A+, but can be used with a model A or B if you purchase a 2×13 extra-tall header and solder that instead of the 2×20
• Install the easy-to-use Python library, check out the examples and you’re ready to go!
For more information on the new DC and Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry Pi jump over to the Adafruit website for details via the link below.
Source: Adafruit
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