Well thought out with useful features
For RedBoard+
Mini review of the Red Robotics Redboard+
The Redboard+ is a hat sized motor driver that packs a lot of features into the hat format. They include
• Built in BEC only need a single power source required to driver the motors and Raspberry Pi.
• The really useful header breaks out Physical pins 1 to 10, that’s 5v, ground, serial, i2c, and GPIO 4.
• Up to 6A per channel,
• Battery voltage monitoring
• 4 channel ADC one channel is dedicated to monitoring the battery voltage.
• 4 5V outputs
• Spare GPIO pins are broken out to 3 pin headers with 5V and GND.
• 3 x i2c headers
• On broad RGB LED.
• Power switch
• Programmable button
Adding the daughterboard adds the following features
• OLED 128 x 32 SSD1306 display
• Serial
• i2c header for an i2c keyboard
Heading to the Redboard page on GitHub, the readme is a great introduction to the Redboard+ with clear instructions how to install the required libraries and example code plus setup services for monitoring the battery and the user defined button. Neil has also supplied a pre-built image for you to flash to a SD card. Tried both methods and was able to get a robot up and running in a few minutes. Using a Pi Hut controller Sherpe respond well to input. The OLED screen displays your robot IP address if connected to wifi network and the voltage of the battery. The user define switch as been setup to display the IP address of your robot, when held in for a few seconds will reboot your robot and if held for longer will turn off your robot.
In conclusion
the Red Robotics Redboard+ is a good value robot controller with great features and an easy to use Python library with a well written guide how to setup your Raspberry Pi with example code to get you started. I was so impressed with the Redboard+ that I treated Bill my eldest son aka @jedifodder on Twitter to an early Christmas present