“Excellent service, quick and efficient from The Pi Hut. You need a steady hand with a soldering iron but then you get to choose the GPIO connector that you want. Would happily buy again and probably will.”
“Let me get this out first, this is an awesome board in all aspects. It can take almost any beating you're thinking of and it will still perform incredibly, but there are two constrains. First, you need to occupy the entire GPIO block if you follow the instructions. That usually doesn't work, since you have to attach more sensors and things to the RPi, an here comes number two: the documentation doesn;'t tell you which are the power pins in case you don't want to use the GPIO block. **This information is crucial**, otherwise you may think that something might be wrong with your soldering. For the sake of clarification I already opened a ticket in the PinOut project so they add these pins, and I will also add them here:
GPIO 39 - Ground (Common)
GPIO 20 - Ground (Common)
GPIO 2 - 5V (Motor 1 & 2)
GPIO 4 - 5V (Motor 3 & 4)
The ground pins need to be both connected for the chips to work, a disconnection in any of them means that the board won't work.
The 5V pins control each of the motor sections, one controls motors 1 & 2, the other 3 & 4, they can be safely disconnected if you want to keep one of the chips deactivated.”
“Although good as a motor controller and it worked great once PiHut sent a replacement chip which was missing from the original kit it has a header that takes up all the pins of the zero. So basically you end up with just a 4 chan motor controller. All the other pins which it doesn't use , you cant use for sensors or lights etc. Would make much more sense if it shipped with a pass through header instead.”
“This is a amazingly simple motor control hat that does exactly what it says it will do. With a little ingenuity you can reorient the direction of the terminals so the wires don't stick out beyond the dimensions of the zero allowing for a tighter fit in your build.”
