Using a Raspberry Pi Motor Driver Board

Question

I recently purchased a Motor Driver board for my Raspberry Pi (This board: http://www.waveshare.com/wiki/RPi_Motor_Driver_Board).

In general, when making ROS robots using Raspberry Pi Motor driver boards, is one expected to write code to translate movement-related ROS messages into appropriate GPIO outputs for the motor controller (e.g. to move forward, turn, etc)? Or is there a "go-to" RPi motor controller module in ROS that most people use? For context, I understand how to control a simulated ROS robot in Gazebo and how to control a Pioneer P3 robot in real-world using ROS, but I'm unclear how people are controlling RPi motor controllers using ROS. Any help is appreciated!

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Originally posted by chambana on ROS Answers with karma: 3 on 2016-12-23

Post score: 0

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Original comments

Comment by KevWal on 2023-03-25:
Sorry for reopening a really old post, but I am also looking for this, but for ROS2

Answer 1

Some will depend on how you control the motors. If you use PWM then something like the i2cpwm_board package (http://bradanlane.gitlab.io/ros-i2cpwmboard) lets you control standard RC servos directly as well as DC motors via PWM motor controllers. The i2cpwm_board package was developed for RPi projects.

If you need encoders for the drive wheels or for joints, that adds to the solution. (I2cpwm_board does not support encoders.)

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Originally posted by suforeman with karma: 300 on 2016-12-23

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1