The TB6612FNG Dual Motor Driver Carrier (https://www.pololu.com/product/713) allows you to drive a pair of small brushed DC motors. This type of motor driver is known as a full H-bridge motor driver. This driver can accept input voltage ranges from 4.5V to 13.5V to drive DC motors, and the logic supply voltage can be 2V to 7V.

A 1×16-pin breakaway 0.1″ male header strip is included with the TB6612FNG motor driver carrier. You can find more details about the breakaway male header at https://www.pololu.com/product/965. This strip can be soldered to the carrier board so that it can be used with solderless breadboards.

Once soldered, you can use it with a solderless breadboard. You can choose a breadboard to fit the size and shape of your robot chassis. Some breadboards offer mounting options, so you can easily mount them using standoffs. Pololu offers a wide array of breadboards (https://www.pololu.com/category/28/solderless-breadboards).

The following diagram shows the top view of the board with pads labeled:

The following table shows the functions of each connection pad:

Motors should be directly connected with the motor driver. The connection between the motor driver and the Raspberry Pi handles the control signal:

• Connecting motors:
  • Connect the wires coming from the left motor to AO1 and AO2
  • Connect the wires coming from the right motor to BO1 and BO2
• Connecting battery pack
  • Connect the battery pack to VMOT and GND
• Connecting Raspberry Pi
  • Connect VCC to the Raspberry Pi 5V
  • To control the left motor, connect:
    • AIN1 to GPIO 4
    • AIN2 to GPIO 5
    • PWMA to GPIO 6
  • To control the right motor, connect:
    • BIN1 to GPIO 27
    • BIN2 to GPIO 28
    • PWMB to GPIO 29
• Connect STBY to the Raspberry Pi 5V

The following screenshot shows the pinout of the Raspberry Pi GPIO header. WiringPi and BCM use different pin number assignments. The C++ code you will be writing uses WiringPi notation for the pin numbering:

The following table shows the control signal for each mode of two motors. You can use Clock Wise (CW), Counter Clock Wise (CCW), and stop modes to control the motors:

Listing 8.1 (https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Hands-On-Internet-of-Things-with-Blynk/blob/master/Chapter%208/Listing%208-1/main.cpp) shows the C++ code that you can use to run on the Raspberry Pi to control the two motors according to the signal coming from the Blynk app:

Listing 8.1: Robot vehicle control code

Refer to the following steps:

1. Open main.cpp and replace the existing code with the Listing 8.1. Then, build the project again.
2. Finally, run the project with the auth token.
3. Tap the play button in the Blynk app builder to run the controller application:

4. Tap each button to move the robot vehicle.