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Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor Bonnet for Raspberry Pi

by Adafruit

Let your robotic dreams come true with the new DC+Stepper Motor Bonnet from Adafruit.

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. Adafruit basically took their super-popular DC+Stepper Motor HAT and squeezed it down and made it fully assembled - plug and play ready to go, no soldering required!

Raspberry Pi and motors are not included. Works with any and all Raspberry Pi computers with 2x20 connection port.

Since the Raspberry Pi does not have a lot of PWM pins, this 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 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 Bonnets, 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 2x20 stacking headers.

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. A chunky polarity protection FET will protect your precious Pi and Bonnet from accidental mis-wiring of the battery/power port. The Bonnet is fully assembled and tested at Adafruit so all you have to do is plug it right onto your Raspberry Pi.

Lets check out these specs again:

  • 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
  • Works best with Raspberry Pi model Zero, A+, B+, or Pi 2, Pi 3, etc but can be used with a model A or B if you purchase a 2x13 stacking header
  • Install the easy-to-use Python library, check out the examples and you're ready to go!

Comes with an assembled & tested Bonnet, terminal blocks and 2x20 header are already attached and ready to go. Raspberry Pi, motors, and battery pack are not included. Check out the detailed tutorial for tons of info including schematics, wiring diagrams, python libraries and example walkthroughs.

Note: The terminal blocks included with your product may be blue or black.

TECHNICAL DETAILS