The Raspberry Pi packs plenty of processing power in a small and inexpensive package and that makes it perfect for robot brains! The only problem? The Raspberry Pi may have plenty of low-level hardware peripherals but motor controllers aren’t one of them. That’s why the RaspiRobot project got started. The RaspiRobot board is an expansion board for the Pi that turns it into a robot controller.

The board comes as a kit of through-hole parts which is easy to assemble with even a basic soldering iron and limited soldering experience. A step-by-step assembly guide is available to help you through the process.

After you’ve assembled it, simply plug the RaspiRobot Board into the GPIO port on the Raspberry Pi and it provides dual bi-directional motor controllers, two open collector outputs, two switch inputs, a pair of status LEDs and even a voltage regulator capable of powering the Pi using a battery source from 7-12VDC.

A Python library module makes it easy to interface with the robot hardware from your software on the Pi. The combination of Raspberry PI and the RaspiRobot Board makes it easier and more affordable than you might think to build a robot with computer vision, web access or even machine learning using the linux operating system and Python code.