Adafruit is now offering an assembled DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing add-on board priced at $21.50 enabling you to use 2 x bi-polar stepper motors or 4 x brushed DC motors (or 1 stepper and 2 DC motors) with the companies FeatherWing range of controllers. Since the FeatherWing only uses the I2C (SDA & SCL pins), it works with any and all Feather boards currently available.
Motor FeatherWing specifications :
– 4 full H-Bridges: the 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 12-bit speed selection (so, about 0.02% resolution)
– Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil, interleaved or micro-stepping.
– Motors automatically disabled on power-up
– Big 3.5mm terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (18-26AWG) and power
– Polarity protected 2-pin terminal block and jumper to connect external power, for separate logic/motor supplies
– Completely stackable design: 5 address-select jumper pads means up to 32 stackable wings: that’s 64 steppers or 128 DC motors! What on earth could you do with that many steppers? I have no idea but if you come up with something send us a photo because that would be a pretty glorious project.
– Download the easy-to-use Arduino software library, check out the examples and you’re ready to go!
Adafruit explained a little more about the new addition to its range of FeatherWing add-on boards : “The original Adafruit Motorshield Kit is one of our most beloved kits, which is why we decided to squish it all together on a FeatherWing to make something even smaller, lighter, and more portable! Instead of using a latch and the Arduino’s PWM pins, we have a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard. This chip handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C.”
Source: FeatherWing DC motor and stepper add-on board
