4WD Driver Platform V1.0

4WD Driver Platform V1.0 (No Intel Edison chip included) is a motor driver board which support 4-wheel driving with bidirectional and full control to each motor. The most important features of this drive board is it expandability achieved by grove interfaces which can enable your project more versatile. It also get detailed and simple SDK (software development kit) which will make you development process quicker and easier. With Edison installed, you can build a powerful system to satisfy your different needs.

Features

Support USB to device UART bridge
Support OTG(On The Go)
Support SPI program port
Support Grove Interface: UART port* 1, I2C port *3
Support 4 wheel encoder motor driving with bidirectional(Peak Current: 3A)
Support overcurrent, over loading and short circuit protection function.
Detailed and simple SDK
Designed for Intel Edison platform.

Specification

Basic parameters
Input voltage	6-16V
Output voltage	5V/4V/3.3V/1.8V
Idle Current	Less than150mA
Dimensions	130*110mm
Motor Driver
Driver chip	MC33931(Freescale) * 4, independent
Input voltage	5-30V
Output current	3A(MAX)
Protection	Auto-cutting output for over temperature, low-voltage and short circuit occurrences
Expandability
I²C interface	3
SPI interface	1
UART interface	2
USB OTG interface	1

Application ideas

Various kinds of robots
Motor driver
Toy car
Industrial Control

Hardware Overview

Note that only 3.3 V voltage is valid to apply on ALL motor interfaces and grove modules.

Get started

Note that this section only shows you how to build basic development environment. You can build a development environment for your project with following guides:

Assemble Edison on 4WD Driver board

Material required

4WD Driver Platform V1.0 *1
Intel Edison *1
2 Micro B to Type A USB cables

Software work

Rule of thumb: We recommend you only select drivers and flash tool to be installed for the first if you connection speed to Intel server is not fast enough. Downloading other tools separately will be much quicker.

Note that 4WD Driver Platform V1.0 is not supported for Windows 10 at the moment.

Check your IDE

Download a putty for serical communication

Open device manager.
Find USB serial port. Under Ports(COM & LPT), find USB Serial Port(COMx)(Example: USB Serial Port(COM3))
Startup putty to and configure it as follow figure shows(marked with red rectangle)

putty configurations

4. Click Open to enter serial terminal

putty login

5. Press Enter key to input user name and password to login to system in Edison.

Note that no password exist if it is the first time you use you Edison chip.

Note that you can flash the latest firmware image to Edison with Intel Flash Tool.

6. Now your IDE is well installed.

Demo

Note that this section will show you a demo which implemented some simple functions.

Note that make sure you have built a development environment successful by former sections and we assume you have got basic knowledge for Arduino platform.

You can refer to Edison 4WD Auto Robotic Platform 2.0 for a practical application with 4WD Driver Platform V1.0.