Pololu DRV8835 Dual Motor Driver Kit for Raspberry Pi

Overview: This motor driver kit and its corresponding Python library make it easy to control a pair of bidirectional, brushed DC motors with a Raspberry Pi. The expansion board features Texas Instruments’ DRV8835 dual H-bridge motor driver IC, which operates from 2 V to 11 V and is particularly well suited for driving small, low-voltage motors. The board can deliver a continuous 1.2 A per channel and tolerate peak currents up to 1.5 A per channel for a few seconds, and the channels can be optionally configured to run in parallel to deliver twice the current to a single motor. The board ships fully populated with its SMD components, including the DRV8835 driver and a FET for reverse battery protection; header pins for interfacing with a Raspberry Pi and terminal blocks for connecting motors and power are included but are not soldered in (see the Assembly with included hardware section below).

The board uses GPIO pins 5, 6, 12, and 13 to control the motor driver, making use of the Raspberry Pi’s hardware PWM outputs, although the pin mappings can be customized if the defaults are not convenient. Note that it is designed specifically for the Model B+ version of the Raspberry Pi; it is not practical to use this expansion board with a Raspberry Pi Model A or Model B due to differences in their pinout and form factor.

We also have a similar DRV8835 shield for Arduinos and Arduino-compatible boards and a smaller DRV8835 carrier for those using a different controller or with tighter space constraints.

Features:

• Dual-H-bridge motor driver: can drive two DC motors or one bipolar stepper motor
• Motor supply voltage: 2 V to 11 V
• Logic supply voltage 2 V to 7 V
• Output current: 1.2 A continuous (1.5 A peak) per motor
• Motor outputs can be paralleled to deliver 2.4 A continuous (3 A peak) to a single motor
• PWM operation up to 250 kHz (ultrasonic frequencies allow for quieter motor operation)
• Two possible interface modes: PHASE/ENABLE (default – one pin for direction, another for speed) or IN/IN (outputs mostly mirror inputs)
• Board can optionally power the Raspberry Pi base directly through add-on regulator (not included)
• Python library makes it easy to get started using this board as a motor driver expansion board
• GPIO pin mappings can be customized if the default mappings are not convenient
• Reverse-voltage protection on motor power supply
• Under-voltage lockout and protection against over-current and over-temperature