PiBord ThunderBorg Motor Driver¶

ThunderBorg is a powerful dual motor control board for making awesome robots with your Raspberry Pi. ThunderBorg is designed to handle up to 5 amps per motor connection, so it’s great for bigger-than-your-average-buggy projects and making awesome robots from your Raspberry Pi.

All ThunderBorg versions include:

Control big or small motors
on-board 5V regulator powers the Raspberry Pi
Runs from any battery pack or power supply from 7-35V
Proper 5A per motor connection.
Speed control forwards and reverse via PWM
On-board voltage monitoring for attached batteries
Mounts directly onto most Raspberry Pi models
Super bright 24-bit LED capable of over 16 million colors
Stackable! Plug in more boards to control up to 200 motors!
Uses I2C SCK/SDA and 3.3V/GND pins for communications
Overheat protection, undervoltage lockout, and short circuit protection

Library Installation¶

The controller needs a special file to drive the ThunderBorg module. It’s not the most convenient to download, but it’s what we have to work with.

Download & extract the example zip file that has the file we need.

pi@raspberry:~$ wget -O examples.zip http://www.piborg.org/downloads/thunderborg/examples.zip
pi@raspberry:~$ unzip examples.zip

Copy this single file we need to the hardware directory.

pi@raspberry:~$ cp examples/ThunderBorg.py remotv/hardware/ThunderBorgLib.py

The files you got from the internet can now be deleted if you so choose.

Configuration¶

There’s not really a whole lot to configure. Almost everything is handled for us by the library. Controller.conf only has a few settings.

Variable	Default Value	Description
`left_motor_max`	`1.0`	Maximum forward speed of the left motor. Ranges from `0.0` to `1.0`
`right_motor_max`	`1.0`	Maximum forward speed of the right motor. Ranges from `0.0` to `1.0`
`sleep_time`	`0.4`	Time in milliseconds to move for each command