Motor Controls

The first thing to do is confirm if the Raspberry Pi is talking to the ThunderBorg successfully. We can check this by trying to control the LED.

Open a terminal on the Pi and type these commands:

cd ~/thunderborg
./tbLedWave.py

If the Pi is talking to the ThunderBorg you should see the LED changing colour though the whole rainbow. If so the problem is related to either the motor outputs or the power inputs.

If you do not see any colours from the LED then there is a problem talking with the ThunderBorg. In this case the problem is likely related to the connection between the boards.

Hello ThunderBorg,

I recently purchased two "ThunderBorg - Dual 5A Motor Controller with DC/DC & RGB LED".
I ran the example with the GUI screen and sliders, the motors and LEDs worked for both boards, no problems.

Then I followed the instructions exactly as stated in (Under "Multiple Boards"):
https://www.piborg.org/blog/thunderborg-getting-started

I ran exactly for the first board:
ThunderBorg.SetNewAddress(10)
And then used for the second board:
ThunderBorg.SetNewAddress(11)

I then connected them in parallel and ran:
print ThunderBorg.ScanForThunderBorg()

It printed out that it found 1 ThungerBorg:
[10]

The raspberry pi was directly connected to [10] and the [11] board was not found at all. So I decided to move the raspberry pi connections over to the other board, it found [11], but not [10].

I also tried the example GUI with sliders again, there was no response to ether board, however the LED was on and nothing seemed hot or drawing more power than before (I was monitoring power). Voltage was 12 V in, amperage was limited to 4.5 Amps peak (often under an amp for testing, never peaked). I supplied power to both boards independently. Other than that, a raspberry pi was hooked up and running off the power that the ThunderBorg provided.

Please help me figure out what is wrong with the boards. I followed the setup instructions exactly, so I do not know why it did not work.
Thanks,
Chris