Hi!
Do you confirm this is possible to power up motors with a higher voltage than 5.5V from the servo pin headers? If I Am correct, VBus and VBat are protected with diodes, so it is even possible to have all connected at the same time…
Thanks,
–
Frédéric
The schematic is here,
robot-board.sch (shopify.com)
I don’t see any separate power connector for just the motors. I don’t think its a good idea to feed power into the servo power header pins.
No, there are no dedicated power input for motors, that’s why I was thinking to use servos headers.
Do you have any technical reason to say it is not a good idea? Looking at the bottom view of the board, the tracks look quite large, to handle some current.
As the motor driver can handle up to 10V, it is too bad the board limits to 5.5V… Of course, one have to be careful not to reach the current limits…
If that higher voltage goes to something that can’t handle it, bad things will happen. Magic Blue Smoke etc. If I was going to do it, I’d study the schematic in depth first. The other gotcha is if two different voltage power supplies meet, they will fight each other trying to regulate the voltage to what they are designed for.
I did have a look at the schematic: the motors power line is only connected to the servo pin headers and the motors driver, and comes from USB Vbus and VBat through diodes, so they these are protected if the motor power voltage is higher.
It is also easy to add an additional external (bigger) diode between the external power supply and the servo pin header (+) so it is also protected from VBus/Vbat if they are higher.
I just wanted to be sure not to miss something…
Let me know if you try it and what happens.
I have an Inventor 2040W. I’m using the Micro Metal Gear Motors, connected to the motor headers with the JST cables. I also have the encoders on mine. It’s another one of my started but not yet finished projects. I have a VL53L5CX 8x8 Time of Flight (ToF) sensor mounted on the front.
I didn’t order it yet; as I’m from France, I would like to group the order with other people of my hackerspace to share the importing taxes (well, in fact, the application fees from the french post are higher than the taxes themselves!).
I’m also still digging Pimoroni shop to find other nice products to order at the same time ;o)
Looking at the schematic, in theory it would be fine to inject higher power in via the Servo headers. It is not something I have personally tested though (would be interested to hear your findings!).
For the avoidance of doubt you could desolder the relevant diodes (D3 and D4 on the schematic).
Or desolder this diode by the audio to make the battery connector be for motor power only (D2 on the schematic).
Thanks for the tips!