Adafruit Motor Hat

Let your robotic dreams come true with the new DC+Stepper Motor HAT from Adafruit This Raspberry Pi add-on is perfect for any motion project as it can drive up to 4 DC or 2 stepper modtors with full PWM control.

Since the Raspberry Pi does not have a lot of PWM pins, Adafruit uses 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 2 GPIO 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 - just remember to purchace and solder in a stacking header instead of the one they include.

Specs

• 4 H-Bridges: TB6612 chipset provides 1.2A per bridge (3A brief 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 motoros (unipolar or bipolar) with a 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 2x13 extra tall header and solder that instead of the 2x20
• Install the easy-to-use Python library, check out the examples and you're ready to go!

Assembly

Refer to their assembly instructions.

Installing the software

Run the following commands to install the correct library. Do NOT use the installation instructions from the adafruit site for the circuit city libraries.

cd /usr/local/src && sudo git clone https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-Motor-HAT-Python-Library.git
cd /usr/local/src/Adafruit-Motor-HAT-Python-Library && sudo python setup.py install

Enable I2C

The Adafruit DC and Stepper Motor Pi Hat kit uses I2C to communicate with your Raspberry Pi.

sudo raspi-config
Interfacing Options -> I2C -> Enable

Configuration Options

Variable	Default Value	Description
turn_delay	0.4	Time in seconds to run the motors while turning. This setting is in the [robot] section.
straight_delay	0.5	Time in seconds to run the motors while going straight. This setting is in the [robot] section.
day_speed	255	Speed of the robot during the day
night_speed	255	Speed of the robot during the night
turning_speed	250	Speed of the robot while turning
forward	[-1,1,-1,1]	Orientation of the motors while moving forward. If one of your motors is backwards, you can change it here.
left	[1,1,1,1]	Orientation of the motors while moving left. If one of your motors is backwards, you can change it here.
slow_for_low_battery	false	Slows the robot down if the battery is low when set to True
charge_hours	3.0	How many hours to charge for
discharge_hours	8.0	How many hours to discharge for
chargeCheckinterval	5
chargeIONumber	17