DC Motor Control Wiring

[nosamttam]

I've got the ASEPP MTD-1 DC motor Controller, and a tank track with 3 connectors (2 wires to each connector) - 1 battery, 1 to each motor.
the batter is 9 volts. What I am really struggling with is the wiring and trying to figure out what wires go where. I can do the coding, but not the wiring. I have a breakout T and a breadboard connected.

Using Raspberry Pi Model 3b.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!
Matt

[pcmanbob]

Hi.

If you can provide a link to were you purchased the motor control board from or better still any data sheets I may be able to help, I did try searching for your broad but could only find one for an Arduino.
failing that post some good quality pictures of board and wiring.

[nosamttam]

Here is the DC Motor Controller:
http://www.mcmelectronics.com/product/O ... -/83-16560


Here is the tank part:
https://www.sinoning.com/damping-balanc ... .html.html
three wire groups of two. two from the motors, one from the battery pack which totals 9V.

Thanks for your help!

[pcmanbob]

So from info supplied from web site
connections are these


now this translates to these places on board.

black arrows show were to connect motors just connect any way round and then once you have them running you can change the connection round if a motor is running the wrong way.
your battery and its ground will connect on the connector shown by the yellow arrow but as I cant see the markings for this connector I cant say which terminals to connect to, but you will need to connect battery ground to GND terminal and your battery to 12v terminal.
now the web site does say its 100% compatible with Arduino which means its 5v logic so it may or may not work with Pi connected directly.

hope this helps

[BMS Doug]

That's a standard L298 motor controller board.

Motor and power connections as described by pcmanbob

Link the enables to the 5v directly above them.

Link In1 - In4 to 4 gpio pins.

Test operation by enabing 1 pin at a time.

[nosamttam]

Guys -
Thanks for all your wiring tips. After much troubleshooting, I found that there were some cold solder joints on the batter pack, which I fixed and the unit lit up when I turned on the power. Yay.

Now, I did tap each of the 4 enables on the VCC and each motor went a different direction based on which enable. So check, the DC Motor controller works.

However, I have tried now to control when each motor fires with GPIO. As there are 4 Enables I connected to GPIO pins 12,16, 23, and 24, respectively.

I've tried a couple of different routines, and nothing seems to fire the enables.

Here is what I've tried:

Code: Select all

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
from time import sleep
 
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
 
Motor1A = 16
Motor1B = 23

 
GPIO.setup(Motor1A,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Motor1B,GPIO.OUT)
 
print "Turning motor on"
GPIO.output(Motor1A,GPIO.HIGH)
GPIO.output(Motor1B,GPIO.LOW)
 
sleep(2)
 
print "Stopping motor"
GPIO.cleanup()

Does this look like it should start? Any coding suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again!

[joan]

The quickest way to find out what is wrong is to post a photo of the connections between the Pi and the motor driver board.

[Major Tom]

Do you have a ground connection from the Pi to the motor driver?

[nosamttam]

Got everything working. Thanks for your help!

[mikronauts]

Correction.

There are two enables, and four direction pins.

Some boards come with the enables tied to 5V, in which case you control the motors with a pair of IN pins each.

So basically:

if ENA/ENB are tied to 5V

send PWM to either IN1 OR IN2, with the other set to 0 in order to go in the two different directions

ditto for IN3 / IN4

Personally, I prefer the three wire control mode for each motor:

Use PWM on ENA for motor 1 speed control
Use IN1/IN2 to set the direction

ditto for ENB & IN3/IN4

Guys -
Thanks for all your wiring tips. After much troubleshooting, I found that there were some cold solder joints on the batter pack, which I fixed and the unit lit up when I turned on the power. Yay.

Now, I did tap each of the 4 enables on the VCC and each motor went a different direction based on which enable. So check, the DC Motor controller works.

However, I have tried now to control when each motor fires with GPIO. As there are 4 Enables I connected to GPIO pins 12,16, 23, and 24, respectively.

I've tried a couple of different routines, and nothing seems to fire the enables.

Here is what I've tried:

Code: Select all

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
from time import sleep
 
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
 
Motor1A = 16
Motor1B = 23

 
GPIO.setup(Motor1A,GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(Motor1B,GPIO.OUT)
 
print "Turning motor on"
GPIO.output(Motor1A,GPIO.HIGH)
GPIO.output(Motor1B,GPIO.LOW)
 
sleep(2)
 
print "Stopping motor"
GPIO.cleanup()

Does this look like it should start? Any coding suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks again!