Adafruit Learning System

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ROBOTICS

23 GUIDES | 152 PAGES | 1 FEATURED | 1 POPULAR

AdaBox 002

Explore and use the contents of your AdaBox 002

by Tyler Cooper

With AdaBox 002, we are bringing you the fun and versatility of a small robot. Learn how to control your new robot friend with a phone and make it sing custom tunes. Learn how to make your new robot more intelligent and independent too!

Wizzy: A Needle Felted Cat

Create animatronic animals with attitude.

by Rick Winscot

Transform a handful of electronics into a fun, fuzzy, and fabulous needle felted animal.

Adafruit DRV8833 DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board

Chopper it up with current limiting motor control

Spin two DC motors or step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper with up to 1.2A per channel using the DRV8833. This motor driver chip is a nice alternative to the TB6612 driver. Like that chip, you get 2 full H-bridges, but this chip is better for low voltage uses (can run from 2.7V up to 10.8V motor power) and has built in current limiting capability. We set it up for 1A current limiting so you don't get more than 2A per chip, but you can also disable the current limiting, or change it to a different limit!

Current Limiting Stepper Driver with DRV8871

Got big motors to drive? Call in the choppers!

This tutorial shows how to combine 2 DRV8871 motor drivers to create a high-performance "Chopper" style stepper driver. The current limiting feature of this H-bridge chip allows you to drive bigger motors, or squeeze more performance from your existing motors.

Adafruit Stepper + DC Motor FeatherWing

Make your feather motorized

A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing which will let you use 2 x bi-polar stepper motors or 4 x brushed DC motors (or 1 stepper and 2 DC motors). Since the FeatherWing only uses the I2C (SDA & SCL pins), it works with any and all Feathers- ATmega32u4, ATSAM M0 or ESP8266-based. You can stack it with any other FeatherWing or with itself (just make sure you have each wing with a unique I2C address)

Build an ESP8266 Mobile Robot

Learn how to make a mobile robot that you can easily control via WiFi!

In this guide, you will learn how to build your own mobile robot based on the ESP8266 WiFi chip. You will then be able to control the robot via WiFi, right from a nice interface on your computer!

Adafruit DRV8871 Brushed DC Motor Driver Breakout

Up to 45V and 3.6A of motor control

Crank up your robotics with powerful Adafruit DRV8871 motor driver breakout board. This motor driver has a lot of great specs that make it useful for a wide variety of mechatronics. In particular, the simple resistor-set current limiting and auto-magic PWM support make it super easy to use.

Adafruit 8-Channel PWM or Servo FeatherWing

A 8 x servo party for your Feather!

You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. What now? You could give up OR you could just get our handy PWM and Servo FeatherWing. It's a lot like our popular PWM/Servo Shield but with half the channels & squished into a nice small portable size and works with any of our Feather boards.

Bringing Characters to Life

More than just code and wires.

by Phillip Burgess

Whether robots, animatronics or purely onscreen avatars, how your creation looks and moves will make or break an emotional connection with your audience. Will they regard it as believable and “alive,” or a dull and obvious assemblage of mechanisms and software?

Simple Raspberry Pi Robot

Build a simple moving robot with a Raspberry Pi and Adafruit's excellent robot platform!

Use a Raspberry Pi and Adafruit Motor HAT to control two DC motors that move a simple robot around using Python code. This is a great base for starting with a Pi robot project!

Bluefruit LE Feather Robot Rover

Control this tiny 2-wheel drive robot with your phone!

by James DeVito

Use a Feather with Bluetooth LE and a Motor Featherwing to kit out a little red rover. Drive it around wirelessly with Bluefruit LE Connect's control pad, or even your phone's accelerometer!

Mini Pan-Tilt Kit Assembly

What to do with that bag of parts.

This step-by-step guide to assembling the Mini Pan-Tilt kit will have you panning and tilting in just a few short minutes.

Open Sesame! A SMS-controlled door lock

Create your own SMS-controlled door lock

Wouldn't it be cool if, instead of having to give your dog-sitter a key to your place, you could just text your home to let her in? Now we build it ourselves using the new Lockitron body, Metro Mini (tiny Arduino-compatible) and a FONA 800 cellular module. Normally, a Lockitron has a built-in WiFi system for locking & unlocking via their App. Since they have redesigned their enclosure, we now have the 'guts' of the Lockitron available for hacking. There's just enough space inside for some tasty Adafruit electronics

Calibrating Sensors

Get peak performance from all your sensors.

Most modern sensors perform quite well right out-of-the box. But the sensor is only part of the measurement system. For best accuracy in critical applications, you will want to calibrate.

Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board

H-Bridge it up

Fire four solenoids, spin two DC motors or step one bi-polar or uni-polar stepper with 1.2A per channel (3A peak) using the TB6612. These are perhaps better known as "the drivers in our assembled Adafruit Motorshield or Motor HAT." We really like these dual H-bridges, so if you want to control motors without a shield or HAT these are easy to include on any solderless breadboard or perma-proto.

Adafruit DC and Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry Pi

Stackable Steppers and DC motor control for your Raspberry Pi

Let your robotic dreams come true with the new DC+Stepper Motor HAT from Adafruit. This Raspberry Pi add-on is perfect for any motion project as it can drive up to 4 DC or 2 Stepper motors with full PWM speed control.

Adafruit 16-Channel PWM/Servo HAT for Raspberry Pi

16 channels of servo-bustin' power for your Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful little computer, but one thing it isn't very good at is controlling DC Servo Motors - these motors need very specific and repetitive timing pulses to set the position. Instead of asking the Pi Linux kernel to send these signals, pop on this handy HAT! It adds the capability to control 16 Servos with perfect timing. It can also do PWM up to 1.6 KHz with 12 bit precision, all completely free-running.

Servo Animatronic Tail

Why wiggle when you can wag?

by Rick Winscot

Add a touch of awesome to your interactive displays, costumes, or art projects with an animatronic tail comprised of 3D printed parts, a silicon tube, a servo, and minimal hardware.

Pixy Pet Robot - Color vision follower

A frisky little friend you can build in an afternoon!

This project pairs the super-awsome Pixy CMUCam-5 vision system with the high performance Zumo robot platform. Combining the powerful object tracking capabilities of the Pixy camera with the nimble Zumo robot base, you can create a responsive little bot that will chase balls and follow you around like a pet!

3D Printed Adabot Figurine

Make your own Adabot Toy!

by Ruiz Brothers

Customize the electronics inside your own Adabot pose-able figurine. A great friend to all engineers and engineers-to-be!

FEATURED

Adafruit Motor Selection Guide

Choose the right motor (and controller) for the job!

There are many types of motors. Big ones, small ones, fast ones, strong ones. Whether you need brute strength, blinding speed or delicate precision movement, there is a motor designed for the task. This guide will help you find to the right motor for your project.

Line Following Zumo Robot Using Simulink

Program your Zumo Robot to follow lines using PID control

This tutorial describes how you can use Simulink to program a PID controller which would enable a Zumo robot to follow lines on the basis of data received from the reflectance sensors.

How to program a Zumo Robot with Simulink

Make the Zumo Robot move along a trajectory using Simulink

Use Simulink to simulate and control the motors in an Arduino Uno powered Zumo Robot to make it move along a curve. This is the second tutorial in a series on using Simulink with Arduino Uno.