PiBorg ThunderBorg Motor Driver

ThundeBorg is a powerful dual motor control board for making awsome robots with your raspberry Pi. ThunderBorg is designed to handle up to 5A per motor connection, so it's great for bigger-than-your-average-buggy projects and making awesome robots from your Raspberry Pi.

All ThunderBorg versions include:

• Control big or small motors
• on-board 5V regulator powers the Raspberry Pi
• Runs from any battery pack or power supply from 7-35V
• Proper 5A output per motor connection
• Speed control forwards and reverse via PWM
• On-board voltage monitoring for attached batteries
• Mounts directly onto most Raspberry Pi models
• Super bright 24-bit LED capable of over 16 million colors
• Stackable! Plug in more boards to control up to 200 motors!
• Controls 2X DC Motors or 4, 5, or 6 wire stepper motors
• Uses I2C SCK/SDA and 3.3V/GND pins for communications.
• Overheat protection, undervoltage lockout, and short circuit protection.

Library Installation

The controller needs a special file to drive the ThunderBorg module. It's not the most convenient to download, but it's what we have to work with.

1. Download & extract the example zip file that has the file we need.

   wget -O ~/examples.zip http://www.piborg.org/downloads/thunderborg/examples.zip
   unzip ~/examples.zip

2. Copy the single file we need to the hardware directory.

   cp ~/examples.ThunderBorg.py ~/remotv/hardware/ThunderBorgLib.py

The files you got from the internet can now be deleted if you so choose.

Configuration

There's really not a whole lot to configure. Almost everything is handled for us by the library. controller.conf only has a few settings.

Variable	Default value	Description
left_motor_max	1.0	Maximum forward speed of the left motor. Ranges from 0.0 to 1.0.
right_motor_max	1.0	Maximum forward speed of the right motor. Ranges from 0.0 to 1.0.
sleep_time	0.4	Time in milliseconds to move for each command.