Motor Control – Philip Drew

Motor Control

I have recently been experimenting with Motor Control using the very popular Raspberry Pi to which I’ve added an Adafruit MotorHAT from Pimoroni. This setup allows a high degree of control of a combination of DC and Stepper motors, essential for the automation of Meccano models. One MotorHAT can control up to 4 DC motors, 2 stepper motors or 2 DC motors plus 1 stepper  motor and it is stated that up to 32 HATs can be mounted on one Raspberry Pi (128 DC motors, 64 stepper motors or any reasonable combination). Obviously, I haven’t tried that claim. The boards allow control of motor speeds: stepper motors by pulsing them in software under program control and DC motors by setting/resetting speed (256 steps to full speed ) and direction.

The boards run under Python 2, an older version of the Raspberry Pi software and I hope that a Python 3 version will be provided in due course. You can see a video of 4 DC motors working here. I now have some stepper motors so will try to get them running - more anon.