Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT for Raspberry Pi - Mini Kit

Amazon, what's to know what my "Warmth" rating is. I guess their AI saw "Hat" in the description and thought it was a hat you wear on your head (HAHA).Works great. Fits on a Raspberry PI 3 and 4 with no issues. I have used it to drive separate motors with no issues.I have not driven stepper motors with it however.

Works well. Using it to drive two DC motors. The speed control on this board with the provided software is excellent. Wish the developers had more language support other than just Python but I suppose that gives me a reason to really get my feet wet with that language. Haven't tested on Steppers yet but I have a few laying about so I'll need to give those a whirl.Setup was fairly easy, be forwarned that you'll need a soldering iron and some solder. The boards inputs\outputs were left to the user to solder themself. You'll be making 50 solder joints on fairly small pins, so if you don't have a soldering iron I'd recommend getting one with a fine tip.The board is unpowered by the Raspberry Pi as would be expected; the specifications claim that the board can support 1.2A continous current with tolerance for 3A spikes. I haven't ran the board near it's limit yet as my motors are rated for 300mA each (so a grand total of 600mA) but from my observations thus far it appears that the board is fairly efficient. It's not getting hot from any of it's components, even the voltage regulator. This board will sit over the entire face of the Raspberry Pi 2, but has a notch cut out for the camera port which was a nice addition, my only gripe so far about the board is that it takes up all 40 of the GPIO slots and doesn't offer an extenders. There are holes made available for unused ports but you need to buy the headers yourself, or just get an expansion board.All in all though it's a good well built product. All solid state parts (no relays). I dropped it on a cement floor from standing height and the board works just fine.Other considerations:*input voltage: 5-12V (Curious to see if it will operate at lower than recommended voltages as I want to power my Pi and this board with a cell phone battery bank)*Nice bright green power LED on the board if you have any gripes with green LEDs*The screw terminals would be best installed 2 pieces at a time; the kit includes 2x 2-port screw terminals and 2x 3-port screw terminals. The terminals appear to have a mate scheme to them to allow them to sit nicely with each other, so I'd recommend inserting those together when you go to solder*The screw terminals require a pretty small phillips screw driver, consider getting on if you don't have one laying about.*Minimalistic packaging. The board came in a bubble wrap envelope inside of a anti-static bag. No box or instructions included.*I had to install the smbus library for Python to get this board to work; I followed the instructions found at http://skpang.co.uk/blog/archives/575 without a hitch. You'll need to use the command sudo i2cdetect -y 1 (on the Pi 2) in order to find which address(es) you can use in your python code. The Adafruit examples used 0x61 where as I can use 0x60/0x70.

First off let me start by saying that I have very minimal experience with programming or coding on any computer let alone a small electronic board like the Adafruit DC & Stepper Motor HAT. I bought this and a raspberry pi without knowing how any of it worked to build my own Electric Powered Longboard and it has been a great experience thus far. Adafruit has a website that you can download open source code from to make learning commands in python super easy, which has been a great tool for learning how to program. If you like to tinker and have a desire to learn about these kind of things for your own project this is for you, if you don't like to spend time tinkering around trying to get something to work, stay away from this product. Couldn't recommend this more, buying another very soon. 5 Stars

I use this motor HAT to control the two DC motors on a Kookye tank car. My application is for time lapse and videography so I needed PWM motor control using a Raspberry Pi 3. The controller works as described and the software library from Adafruit does the job just fine in Python. I like the fact that the controller operates separately from the Python code so once the motors are given a command, the code can do something else.

Being totally new to Pi's I was a little worried I wouldn't be able to get this to work but it was pretty easy to get up and running. Soldering on the header and terminal blocks did require a fine tip soldering iron but it wasn't to hard. The instructions and examples from the Adafruit site were very easy to follow and I had both DC & Stepper motors working right from the start without any problems.The only reason I knocked of two stars was because it was missing one of the two pin terminal blocks (reading the other reviews this seems to be a common problem) so I had to solder power right to the board. This makes changing power sources a bit of a PITA and if I wasn't so excited to try this thing out I would have returned it and reordered another one.Overall its a great addition to the Pi and fun to experiment with.