Single Battery

Eliminated a battery! (maybe)

I connected the main battery (PowerGen) to the Adafruit MotorHat with a USB to Barrel Jack cable and a Barrel Jack to screw terminal block adapter. This lets me run both the Raspberry Pi and the motors off a single battery. More importantly, a battery that can be continually charging without having to shut down the Raspberry Pi.

From everything I’ve read, this shouldn’t work. The voltage drop when the motors first start moving should be enough to brown-out the Pi. In my so-far-limited testing that didn’t happen. My current theories for why not:

• The Motor Hat has a circuit built in to prevent it.
  • From reading the documentation on Adafruit, I think this might be the case.
• I simply got lucky in my testing.
• The battery itself has a circuit to protect one USB port from the other.