Driving DC Motors with Circuit/MicroPython - Adafruit Crickit & Circuit Playground Express

Driving LED lights is all well and good, and servos are great, but when most people think of robots they think of wheels and DC motors.

Let's make a thing that moves!

Full code

We begin much the same as the previous examples, in that we need I2C, we need the SeeSaw library to speak I2C to the Board, and we need PWM and Timing.

This time we add the Adafruit Motor module, which makes motor driving easy.

The motor pins are 18, 19, 22 and 23. Attach your first motor to 18 and 19, and second to 22 and 23. Doesn't matter which wire goes in where, if it runs backwards just replace the wires or reverse in code.

motor_a = motor.DCMotor(PWMOut(seesaw, 22), PWMOut(seesaw, 23))

Yeah, you could speak to the pins, making one pin low and the other high to drive forwards, or vice versa to reverse, but the motor library has a throttle property for speed and direction.

Full forwards is 1, reverse is -1:

motor_a.throttle = 1

motor_a.throttle = -1

and setting to 0.5 (plus or minus) makes it half speed, with zero being stop.

Powering the Crickit

The Crickit is powered 5v via 2.1mm barrel connector. I got a USB to barrel cable for USB power, but also have a screw terminal barrel connector so I can use a 4 x NiMH batteries battery case.

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