Changing sensor ports to motor

Hello,

I’m working on a school project and our robot will require five motors to work as intended. I’m wondering if it’s possible to alter one or more of the sensor ports (through software) to function as a motor port?

Kristian

Hey Kristian, unfortunately no. The motors require special chips to control them and these chips are not on the sensor ports. You won’t be able to get a motor running on a sensor port.

Is there any way you could reduce the number of motors you need to use?

Is there any way two of the motors are running the exact same program (speed and direction?). This is probably the easiest fix, because you can just split the motor line.

Another option might be to break out a sensor port to an h-bridge on a breadboard and use our breadboard breakout to connect and control a 5th motor. This would be a bit of work, both software and hardware.

I was thinking about solving this by connecting the extra servo on the Pi or adding an arduino but controlling it with an h-bridge could be a cool way of doing it :slight_smile:

Thank you for a swift reply and good suggestions.

OUr pleasure, I’m glad to idea helped out. If you make something like this, could you share the design? I think other folks would be really interested in how you did it.