Ok I understand, but I won’t need a schematic here as I’ve managed to fix it (eventually…). Thank you for the helpful information though and in future I’ll try and provide a schematic to help myself and others understandNot for me. For you.I mean I’ve sent an image and pinout diagram already, what else so you need?
Not without a schematic. Otherwise it's just speculation.
A schematic is a diagram showing all of the components in the circuit, and how they are connected. If there is a problem, you can look at the schematic and see precisely how everything is supposed to work. For example, the schematic would show if pin 14 and 15 were connected, and where, therefore you could see if they have any effect on the board, or if you were on a wild goose chase.
Based on what I can see, the board is based on a DRV8833 motor driver chip from Texas Instruments. They certainly don't need serial to work.
Here is the datasheet for the DRV8833:
https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/drv8833.pdf
It tells you what the chip is, and how it works. It also details the function of each pin. Your motor controller board has assembled this chip on a neat board, with connectors, but you could build your own with identical functionality very easily. Unfortunately, without a schematic, you don't know which pins are wired to which GPIO, so you don't know how to write your own software for testing, or to replace the provided software if something goes wrong. You could figure it out by tracing the PCB tracks by hand, but a schematic would be easier.
Here's a link to another product using the same chip:
https://www.pololu.com/product/2130
You could use this in place of the CamJam board if you wanted to, but it's less convenient. As you can see, near the bottom of the page is a schematic, so you can see how to integrate this board into your own project.
You could also note down the pins that are used in the example software:
https://github.com/CamJam-EduKit/EduKit ... -motors.py
You can see it only uses four pins, so you could write some even simpler code that tested the driver. You can also see it does not use pins 14/15. (Yes, that is the RPi.GPIO version of the code, but the pin numbers are the same for Pi 5).
I suspect you have plugged the board in wrongly, or your Pi is damaged, or you are trying to use RPi.GPIO on the Pi 5, which won't work.
The Texas Instruments sheet goes a little over my head (A-Level physics doesn’t quite cover that), but I get the general gist of how the board works at this point.
For reference it does only use 4 pins: 7, 8, 9,10.
I got in a muddle as 14, 15, GND and pin 4 power the LED’s (but this is just superficial and has no functionality).
The difference is that Pi 5 just used the ‘LED pins’ differently to Pi 4 B (although I found a way to make them work the same - but you don’t need to!)
I guess I must have fried my motor board while messing around (assuming it wouldn’t work on Pi 5 without LED’s and got errors in code as running of USB stick originally - but though it was due to the LED’s). A bit stupid on my behalf - sorry.
Also I’m using gpiozero, and am well aware RPi.GPIO doesn’t work on Pi 5. So my Pi 5 works and I’ll explain the left motor activation on boot and shutdown in my next post.
Thank you for your help, it’s much appreciated
Statistics: Posted by starman7315 — Tue Feb 04, 2025 12:37 am