5.2 KiB
Getting started
Welcome to the ESCAPE board - this guide will describe all the features of the ESCAPE board and show you how to control up to 6 motors and 6 servos very simply.
Board layout
Before we start to assemble your board, we'll take a look at what each section is and what it is for. Place your ESCAPE board on a table in front of you and identify each area.
CPPM / PPM-SUM
This is the connection that allows you connect a Radio Control (RC) receiver so that you can extend the range of control for your robot.
Motors
The ESCAPE board can control 6 independent motors. Each motor has a connection with three pins onto which you will plug the control wire from the motors ESC unit. The centre pin on the Motor connections aren't connected together. This is because the centre wire from an ESC sends 5v and having multiple 5v power supplies connected to each other can be very bad.
Servos
The ESCAPE board has connections for 6 Servos. They default to being powered by the ESCAPE boards power supply, but we can switch them to be powered by the Raspberry Pi by placing a jumper on the POWER pins (assuming the Raspberry Pi is powered via its USB port).
We can also power the Raspberry Pi by placing an ESC control wire on one of the Servo connects and using the 5v sent on its power wire with the POWER jumper in place.
We'll go into more detail on this later, so don't worry about it for now.
Power
The power connection should accept 5v DC - the power you connect here is isolated from your Raspberry Pi and only goes to the servos unless you have the POWER jumper in place.
Expansion area
This area to the right of the board is for adding extra expansion boards to increase the functionality available to you. For more information on adding expansion boards look here
Address selection
The ESCAPE board uses I2C to control the motors. You can have a lot of I2C controlled boards on your Raspberry Pi at the same time, but each must have a unique address.
We have set up the 640 board to use the address 0x61. If you find that this conflicts with another board you want to use, and you can't change the address of that board, then you can use these 5 solder jumpers to change the 640 board address.
How to change the address
Each of the address pins (A0 - A4) can be set to 0 (un-soldered) or 1 (soldered). You set an address pin to 1 by adding solder to each pad of the address pin until the two parts join.
Each address jumper has a binary value - A0 = 1, A1 = 2, A3 = 4, A4 = 8
The starting address for the ESCAPE board is 0x61 - if you look closely at the jumper pads labelled A0 you will see a small connection between them setting this jumper to 1.
If we solder jumper A1 then the address will be 0x61 + 2 = 0x63. Soldering A1 and A2 will give us 0x61 + 2 + 4 = 0x67
Setting up your Pi
Before we can start using the ESCAPE board we need to enable the interfaces that the board uses on your Raspberry Pi.
The ESCAPE board is controlled using the I2C interface. Any expansion boards attached to your ESCAPE board are controlled using the SPI interface.
Enable I2C and SPI in Pixel
If you are using the graphical interface on your Raspberry Pi then click on your main menu icon, move down to Preferences and click on the Raspberry Pi Configuration menu item. Once open click on the Interfaces tab and you should see something like in the image below.
Make sure that the line labelled I2C is set to enabled.
If you have an expansion board then you'll need to enable the SPI interface as well on the line above, so click the Enabled setting next to the SPI label
Once you click Ok you may be promtped to reboot your Raspberry Pi - go ahead and reboot.
Enable I2C and SPI on the command line
If you are only using the command line on your Raspberry Pi then you will need to use the text version of the Raspberry Pi configuration tool to enable the interfaces.
Type the following to bring up the configuration interface:
$ sudo raspi-config
Once the menu is showing, scroll down to the Advanced Options menu and press Enter.
Now we'll need to enable the I2C interface, so move down I2C menu and press Enter. You'll be asked if you want to enabled I2C - select Yes and you will see a confirmation and be returned to the main menu.
Go to the Advanced Options again and do the same for SPI
This time when you are returned to the main menu, move down to the Finish option (pressing the right arrow key twice will get you there) and press enter.
You have now enabled the interfaces you need to use your board.