Ryanteck Motor Controller Board

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZLzXlM-Qv0&w=560&h=315]

This inexpensive motor controller board http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/5269 gives full control over 2 motors and is one of the easiest ways to get into Robotics on the Raspberry Pi.

To use it in ScratchGPIO, simple set variable AddOn to RTKMotorCon and then you can use 2 variables – Motor1 and Motor 2 and vary the speed and direction of the motors from -100 to 100.

It also breaks out the 3.3V, GND and the I2C pins so it is very easy to add on other I2C devices as well.

(Support currently only available in the ScratchGPIO dev version http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/scratchgpio-development-testing/ )

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7 Responses

  1. Robert Wiltshire says:

    Thanks for making ScratchGPIO. I’ve been having a great time getting my children, and their friends, getting things to run through Scratch. But how do you get Scratch to communicate with the Pi in the video? I’ve SSHd’d into a Pi before but what you are doing looks a bit beyond my abilities.

    • cymplecy says:

      Bloomin heck – I can’t believe I’m this far down the ScratchGPIO path and then someone comes along and asks how do you remote in 🙂 I’ve been doing it for so long, its never occurred to me that the RPI doesn’t do it out of the box and that I need to point out how to do – thanks for the prompt 🙂

      I use X11VNC and follow these instructions

      I will get on with making a simple autoinstall script for it

      regards
      Simon

      • Robert Wiltshire says:

        Instructions are clear but for someone who really doesn’t know it’s missing something. To get Scratch to operate as in the video requires two computers, a PC and a RPi. So does the code in the instructions go into the PC or RPi or maybe both? If it is the RPI then how does ScratchGPIO communicate with the RPi from the PC (or is it a second RPi?). Sorry about this but I’m still quite clueless.

        • cymplecy says:

          Your doing well here – I always like it when someone drags me up because I’m always pulluing others up for being too advanced in their instructions.

          I don’t want o have to write full docs on setting up PC/RPI so I’ll find to find a nice blog that someone else has already done – but you you – here goes.
          To use an RPI as a battery powered robot, you need to have a method of connecting another computer to it using wifi. SO first thing is to get that working. Then the software needed to remote control the RPi (A VNCServer) should be installed on the RPi as per instructions in last post.
          Then you need to get a VNCViewer program running on you other computer – I myself use TightVNC on XP/Win7 machines http://www.tightvnc.com/ . You install this on your computer (don’t need the server part – just the client bit as we want to control the RPi and not have the RPi control our main computer)

          Hopefully, you can then use TightVNC and remote control/view your Raspberry Pi screen.

          Assuming so, then you can just run ScratchGPIO on your RPi and robert is your aunts brother 🙂

          Simon

          • Robert Wiltshire says:

            That makes sense now. I’ve been using Putty and WinSCP but didn’t know what the VNC was for. I can see now how Scratch appeared to be running elsewhere and controlling the Pi when in fact it wasn’t. Thanks for that.

  2. Robert says:

    Got it all working. Even tried android Remote Ripple from the pub last night with port forward set up. Frightened my wife at home when everything sprang to life by itself. Thanks for the help and keep up the good work. Scratch GPIO is fabulous teaching tool.

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