You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a
piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a
lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize
that your
microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You
could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver
breakout.
When we saw this chip, we quickly realized what an excellent add-on
this would be. Using only two pins, control 16 free-running PWM
outputs!You can even chain up 62 breakouts to control up to 992 PWM
outputs (which we would really like to see since it would be glorious)
* It's an i2c-controlled PWM driver with a built in clock. That
means that, unlike the TLC5940 family, you do not need to continuously
send it signal tying up your microcontroller, its completely free
running!
* It is 5V compliant, which means you can control it from a 3.3V
microcontroller and still safely drive up to 6V outputs (this is good
for when you want to control white or blue LEDs with 3.4+ forward
voltages)
* 6 address select pins so you can wire up to 62 of these on a
single i2c bus, a total of 992 outputs - that's a lot of servos or
LEDs
* Adjustable frequency PWM up to about 1.6 KHz
* 12-bit resolution for each output - for servos, that means about
4us resolution at 60Hz update rate
* Configurable push-pull or open-drain output
* Output enable pin to quickly disable all the outputs
We wrapped up this lovely chip into a breakout board with a couple
nice extras
* Terminal block for power input (or you can use the 0.1" breakouts
on the side)
* Reverse polarity protection on the terminal block input
* Green power-good LED
* 3 pin connectors in groups of 4 so you can plug in 16 servos at
once (Servo plugs are slightly wider than 0.1" so you can only stack 4
next to each other on 0.1" header
* "Chain-able" design
* A spot to place a big capacitor on the V+ line (in case you need
it)
* 220 ohm series resistors on all the output lines to protect them,
and to make driving LEDs trivial
* Solder jumpers for the 6 address select pins
This product comes with a fully tested and assembled breakout as well
as 4 pieces of 3x4 male straight header (for servo/LED plugs), a 2-pin
terminal block (for power) and a piece of 6-pin 0.1" header (to plug
into a breadboard). A little light soldering will be required to
assemble and customize the board by attaching the desired headers but
it is a 15 minute task that even a beginner can do.
Check out our tutorial with Arduino [1] and you can get our
documented Arduino library which has both PWM and Servo examples from
github! [2]
Dimensions (no headers or terminal block) 2.5" x 1" x 0.1" (62.5mm x
25.4mm x 3mm)
Weight (no headers or terminal block): 5.5grams
Weight (with 3x4 headers & terminal block): 9grams
Links:
* Adafruit16-Channel Servo Driver with Arduino [3]
* Adafruit 16 Channel Servo Driver with Raspberry Pi [4]
Links:
------
[1] http://learn.adafruit.com/16-channel-pwm-servo-driver
[2] https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit-PWM-Servo-Driver-Library
[3] http://learn.adafruit.com/16-channel-pwm-servo-driver
[4]
http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-16-channel-servo-driver-with-raspberry-pi
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