Using Generic 2-wire DC Motor on XRP?

Hardware
1

Hello from DevilBotz 2876, Bulington, MA!

We are hoping to use the XRP robots this year to replace the ROMI for our 2nd annual internal Fall MiniFRC competition. We try to make the challenge as similar to the prior year’s challenge (e.g. Crescendo), so wanted to make sure we are able to make a “shooter” of some sort using a generic DC motor. We bought 6 Pin JST SH female pig tail connectors to allow us to plug into the XRP motor 3/4 ports.

The 6-pins are:

  1. Ground
  2. 3V3
  3. Encoder A
  4. Encoder B
  5. Phase Pin
  6. Enable Pin

These motors do not have an encoder, so would the motor “just work” by connecting the Ground and 3V3 connections and leaving the other 4 pins disconnected?

2

Hi there, apologies for the delay!

Yes, generic motors without encoders can be used with the XRP. In your code, be sure to create the motors as type Motor and not type EncodedMotor, because the latter provides functions that will not work without an encoder attached to the motor.

One other note, your pinout is not quite correct. The connector pinout is:

  1. Motor +
  2. Motor -
  3. 3V3
  4. Encoder A
  5. Encoder B
  6. GND

So you’d just connect the +/- pins to your motor, and leave the other pins disconnected.

Hope this helps!