Gertbot - Motor Power Controller for Raspberry Pi

Gertbot - Motor Power Controller for Raspberry Pi

The Gertbot is a motor/power controller board for the Raspberry-Pi. The strength of the board is that it has its own CPU which frees up the Raspberry-Pi from a lot of intense computations and will take care of all the real time requirements. All you have to do is give it high level commands. Like: Board 2, Motor 1, take 2432 steps at 67 Hz. Even giving those commands is done for you using the free GUI which comes with it!

Hardware features:

• Four H-bridges 8V-30V, 2.5A.
• Bridges can be re-configured for 2x 5A or 1x 10A.
• Two open drain outputs 30V, 3A.
• Power full 64MHZ ARM Cortex-M3 processor
• RS232 connects direct to the Raspberry-Pi or other serial interface.
• Cascade port to control up to four boards at a time.

20-pin connector programmable for:

• Automatic motor end-stop
• Four 12-Bit ADC ports
• Two 12-bit DAC ports
• 8-16 general purpose I/O 

Software controllable features:

• Brushed motors:
• Control direction
• Speed control PWM 10Hz-10KHz, 0-100%.
• Soft start 0.1sec .. 5 seconds prevents in-rush current
• Stop on switch hit.

Stepper motors:

• Take X-steps in either direction
• Step speed 0.06 Hz .. 5KHz.
• Stop on switch hit.

Digital Command Control (model train control):

• Can send any DCC command 3..6 bytes
• Programmable pre-amble length and repeat count

Short-circuit or high temperature error detection

• On error, keep running, stop motor, stop board or stop all boards
• I/O pins programmable functions
• Emergency stop, halts whole system.

The board comes with drivers, example code and a GUI all complete with source code, all of which are available at GertBot.com