This Raspberry Pi add-on is perfect for any motion project as it can drive up to 4 DC or 2 Stepper motors with full PWM speed control. 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 current capability (you can draw up to 3A peak for approx 20ms at a time), a big improvement over L293D drivers and there are built-in flyback diodes as well.
We even had a little space so we added a polarity protection FET on the power pins and a bit of prototyping area. And the HAT is assembled and tested here at Adafruit so all you have to do is solder on the included 2×20 plain header and the terminal blocks.
Features:
4 H-Bridges: TB6612 chipset provides 1.2A per bridge 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
Install the easy-to-use Python library, check out the examples and you’re ready to go!
