Technical summary
Do you want to build a robot project, such as a hexapod, or a project requiring many servo motors? Do you want to drive several LEDs in PWM? And your Arduino board does not have enough PWM outputs? This shield is made for you, because it has 12 PWM outputs for driving servo motors or LEDs with 12-bit precision. In addition, this shield uses an I2C link needing only two pins (SDA and SCL), which lets you use it alongside other shields without monopolizing too many pins.
This shield has an address selectable by soldering, which allows up to 62 shields to be used, generating a total of 996 PWM outputs. It is even possible to use other I2C sensors or peripherals that do not use the base address 0x40.
Based on the PCA9685 chip, here are a few advantages:
- It has an internal clock, so you do not have to supply a PWM value continuously: once entered, the chip stores it and keeps varying the output.
- 5V compatible, but it can also be driven from an Arduino board with 3V3 signals without any risk.
- 6 selectable addresses allowing 62 shields to be chained.
- PWM frequency adjustable up to 1.6 kHz
- 12-bit resolution per channel, i.e. a period of 4µs at 60Hz
- Output configurable as push-pull or open-drain.
A few extras present on the shield:
- Possibility of using a screw terminal block for the external power supply (supplied)
- Reverse polarity protection on the screw terminal block.
- Two voltage-presence LEDs (VCC and V+)
- A block of 3 pins per channel to plug a servo motor in directly; the blocks are grouped in fours of 4.
- Possibility of using right-angle connectors in order to stack several boards (not supplied)
- A spot for soldering a large capacitor on the V+ line if needed.
- 220R resistors are soldered on each PWM output to protect them and to be able to drive LEDs directly.
- Solderable jumpers for selecting the shield's address.
- Free prototyping area to add whatever you want.
The product is sold assembled and tested with:
- 4 x 4x3 connectors for plugging in the servo motors or the LEDs
- 1 x 2-point screw terminal block for external power supply.
- 1 x 36-point strip connector for the shield part.
Features
- Dimensions (without the headers and the screw terminal block): 2.1" x 2.7" x 0.1" (54mm x 70mm x 3mm)
- This I2C board uses 7-bit addresses between 0x60-0x80, selectable by solder jumper
