propeller board help

Jeremy072021

hey, I've been trying to find out for a while, and I'm positive that I'm not researching right, so I figured I would ask on here, is there anyway to combine 2 of the propeller robot control boards (used on the stingray) together, so that I could hook up four DC motors to it and the two boards would still be able to function as one?

thank you

Graham Stabler

Yes and no but you shouldn't.

From what I can see the robot control boards contain a propeller and a bunch of interfacing chips to connect to servos and a dual h-bridge to control DC motors. The only way the two boards would ever act as one would be to use just one of the processors and then wire some lines from that processor to the h-bridge of the second board. This would allow you to drive an extra two motors but would be a total waste of the second board and your money.

Much easier is to take a look at the schematic for the robot control board (available to download on its store page) and create your own version of that part of the circuit. You only need a few components and you could put these on vero/matrix board, the IC seems to be available as a through hole component (L6205, about $15 from mouser).

Looking at the PCB the lines to the servo driver buffers which come from the propeller IO pins seem to be accessible (they appear to be rows of through-hole plated holes) so you could solder a header in to these for your little motor drive satellite board. Then you would just modify the code to match the pins used.

Cheers,

Graham