Hyaline Motor Controller XL i2c

A board for Raspberry Pi Pico compatible boards, designed for controlling motors.

It can be used with pretty much any Pico-like board. It uses an i2c-based interface for controlling the motors, which frees up a lot of gpio for other things – at the expense of a limited PWM frequency of 1.6khz maximum (which can cause audible high frequency noise in some motors).

The board is completely decked out with a bunch of features to make it easy to hack and use it as the “brain” of a motorized project of any kind.

Designed by Mads Kjeldgaard for hyaline.systems.

Features

• Control 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors
• Control the speed and direction of each motor
• Self-documenting: All pins and connections are written on the board itself.
• Encoder pins broken out for each motor
• All unused gpio pins broken out to headers
• Unused PWM pins broken out (you can control servos or LED’s with these)
• Uses PCA9685 PWM driver via i2c – frees up a lot of pins (but also limits PWM frequency to 1.6khz max)
• NeoPIXEL LED on board for sassy RGB lighting
• RUN-button to allow restarting the Pico (big timesaver when programming it)
• I2C headers including StemmaQT/Qwiic connectors to allow connecting external sensors and devices via i2c.
• Power features:
  • 5V-15V input for motors
  • Reverse polarity protection
  • Onboard 5V regulator – the board only needs one power source to power both motors and the microcontroller board.
  • Power outputs for 3.3V, 5V and the motor power supply (after reverse polarity protection circuitry).
• Completely open source.
• 4 x M3 mounting holes
• Includes software examples.
• Small (59.07 mm x 76.33 mm)

Datasheets

• PWM chip: PCA9685
• Motor driver: TB6612FNG

Videos

A silly demo: Randomizing the motor speeds and directions to make some bells jingle.

Credits

• Thanks PCBWay for sponsoring the PCB’s for this project during prototyping.
• Thanks Thom, Niklas, Eirik, Fredrik and others for inspiration.

#electronics #art #kinetic #raspberrypipico