Adafruit PWM Servo Hat

The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful little computer, but one thing it isn’t very good at is controlling DC servo motors - these motors need very specific and repetitive timing pulses to set the position. Instead of asking the Pi Linux kernel to send these signals, pop on Adafruit’s handy HAT or Bonnet.

These boards add the capability to control 16 servos with perfect timing. They can also do PWM up to 1.6 KHz with 12 bit precision, all completely free running.

Works with any servo that can be powered by 5V and take 3.3V logic level signals.

The Adafruit 16-Channel 12-Bit PWM/Servo HAT or Bonnet (or other PCA9685 based HAT or Bonnet) will drive up to 16 servos or PWM outputs over I2C with only 2 pins. The on-board PWM controller will drive all 16 channels simultaneously with no additional Raspberry Pi processing overhead. What’s more, you can stack up to 62 of them to control up to 992 servos - all with the same 2 pins!

Library Installation

You’ll need to install the Adafruit_PCA9685 Python module. This may also require enabling I2C. If you are using a Raspberry Pi, you can enable I2C in the Interfacing Options menu of raspi-config.

pi@raspberry:~$ sudo raspi-config

Once that’s done, from your command line run the following command.

pi@raspberry:~$ sudo python -m pip install adafruit-pca9685

Configuration Options

Variable	Default Value	Description
address	0x40	The I2C address of the board.
pwm_freq	60	The frequency at which to pulse width modulate.
more_debug	False	Enables more verbose debugging when set to True.