Esc with brushless motor and PCA9685

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson & Embedded Systems Jetson Nano
1

I am trying to figure out how to use the PCA9685 to control an esc and brushless motor. I know it is possible because people have done it with things like the donkey car but I don’t am trying to figure out how you would code it to control one. Any help would be great. Thanks!

2

Hi dwightfoster03, digging into the DonkeyCar actuator code, it appears to use the Adafruit_PCA9685 library for interfacing with the PCA9685 controller.

I also found this blog post which covers setup of the PCA9685 library:

$ pip3 install Adafruit_PCA9685
3

Also, I just came across this GitHub repo about setting up alternate PCA9685 driver:

[url]https://github.com/juanmed/nano_gpio[/url]

4

My experience doing this is that you’re better off with a UART or USB ESC like the Odrive or the V_ESC.
I use a V_ESC with a Jetson AGX Xavier, and it’s pretty easy to control.
(Honestly, I’d probably choose the ODrive if buying one again.)