You want to make a cool robot, or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. Then you realize that your microcontroller has a limited number of PWM outputs! What now? You could give up OR you could just get this handy PWM and Servo driver breakout. This is a low cost version of Adafruits 16-channel 12-bit PVM/servo driver.
Using only two pins, control 16 free-running PWM outputs! You can even chain up 62 breakouts to control up to 992 PWM outputs.
Features:
- It's an i2c-controlled PWM driver with a built in clock. That means that, unlike the TLC5940 family, you do not need to continuously send it signal tying up your microcontroller, its completely free running!
- It is 5V compliant, which means you can control it from a 3.3V microcontroller and still safely drive up to 6V outputs (this is good for when you want to control white or blue LEDs with 3.4+ forward voltages)
- 6 address select pins so you can wire up to 62 of these on a single i2c bus, a total of 992 outputs - that's a lot of servos or LEDs
- Adjustable frequency PWM up to about 1.6 KHz
- 12-bit resolution for each output - for servos, that means about 4us resolution at 60Hz update rate
- Configurable push-pull or open-drain output
- Output enable pin to quickly disable all the outputs
- Terminal block for power input (or you can use the 0.1" breakouts on the side)
- Reverse polarity protection on the terminal block input
- Green power-good LED
- 3 pin connectors in groups of 4 so you can plug in 16 servos at once (Servo plugs are slightly wider than 0.1" so you can only stack 4 next to each other on 0.1" header
- "Chain-able" design
- 220 ohm series resistors on all the output lines to protect them, and to make driving LEDs trivial
- Solder jumpers for the 6 address select pins
Note: Check out our tutorial with Arduino and you can get our documented Arduino library which has both PWM and Servo examples. |