4tronix Picon Plus

Les Pounder needs to build a robot to help during social isolation. But can he build a robot butler to deliver more Pis to his table?

- Les Pounder

Advanced robotics projects with the Raspberry Pi need a little more power than others. We need bigger motors, and more of them. We need servos to control steering and inputs to simplify sensors such as ultrasonic and IR. The 4tronix Picon Plus fills this void and offers a little extra for £30.

Designed for the HAT standard and compatible with all recent models of Raspberry Pi, Picon Plus occupies all 40 pins of the GPIO but it only uses four pins, I2C and power pins. This leaves the rest of the pins available for general use. To access the pins an extension header is required. More Picon Plus boards can be added on top of each other for a total of four boards and 16 motors! Each of the Picon Plus boards can be controlled independently thanks to the I2C interface and their unique identifiers.