Powering the BrickPi

BrickPi
1

Hello, I’m Jose Luis Tomas teacher of computer science in a high school in Valencia (Spain). Several months ago we are working on a project to build a mobile robot controlled by a wifi connection.

We have the following problem:

Lego motors are much faster than when connected directly to a Lego brick. When we connect this motor to a BrickPi port and we put the max value (255), the speed and power are much lower. The robot is supplied with a standard battery Power Bank 5200 milliamps. We do not understand this behavior.

We only power the robot with a Power Bank into the micro usb raspberry, but the documentation shows how power the brickpi only with a battery pack attached onto the white Power Connector in the BrickPi.

We do not know if we can connect at the same time the Power Bank and the battery pack to get more power.

And if we connect the robot only with the baterry pack, we will get more power than the Power Bank?

Best Regards:
Jose Luis

2

Hi Jose,

We have instructions on how to power the BrickPi here: http://www.dexterindustries.com/BrickPi/getting-started/power-up-the-brickpi/

We do NOT recommend that you power the BrickPi with just a USB power supply and run the motors. If you’re going to use the motors, you WILL need to use the AA battery pack (best to us the 8XAA battery pack) and connect it to the BrickPi. You run the risk of damaging your Pi and your battery if you run the motors off of a USB power supply with nothing else powering the BrickPi.

John

3

Thank’s John, I will try to power the BrickPi with a baterry pack