Pico-Motor-Boot: Motor board for Raspberry-Pi Pico

PICO-MOTOR-BOOT : Control motors with Raspberry-Pi Pico

Need to control one or two DC motors... or a stepper motor with your Raspberry Pi Pico?
Here is the expansion board you need!

The Pico-Motor-Boot uses the TB6612 to control one or two DC motors (in both direction and speed) as well as a bipolar stepper motor (without micro-stepping).

The TB6612 is a dual H-bridge, allowing for autonomous control of DC motors (without blocking the user script).
Speed ​​control is achieved via the 50 Hz PWM signal generated on two of the Pico's pins.

The TB6612 also allows control of a stepper motor, but this requires precise control of the two H-bridges to increment the steps on the motor.

By change, the MicroPython library implements an interrupt routine executed 1000 times every second. The latter takes care of the handling of H-Bridges. The MicroPython script must only specify the number of steps to take and the direction. Finally, the rotation speed is fixed by the rpm property indicating the number of revolutions per minute.
The library supports a rotation speed between 1 and 120 RPM (and even higher).

The rpm property also allows for a change in speed during motor rotation... thus enabling the creation of accelerations and decelerations.

Finally, since the stepper motor rotation is autonomous, it performs the motor rotation without the assistance of the user script, which can perform other tasks during the execution of the rotation (see examples).

Of course, the Pico-Motor-Boot board doesn't come alone... a complete documentation including schematic, wiring examples, demonstration script and MicroPython library (see the tutorial section) are available.

Technical details

• Use the GPIO 16 to 21 (see schematic in the images)
• GPIO 22 can be used to control the standby mode (the jp_STB must be soldered)
• Dual H-Bridge motor controler: can control 2 DC motors or 1 bipolar stepper.
• Recommended motor voltage (VMOT): 4.5 V to 13.0 V (can work from 2.5V with degraded performances)
• Logic voltage: 3.3 V
• Max current: 3 A per channel
• Steady current: 1 A per channel (2A in bridged mode). Steady-state current.
• Max PWM freq: 100 kHz
• Thermal protection
• Filtering caps (logic & motor circuit).
• Polarity protection
• TB6612FNG datasheet (pdf)