A Feather board without ambition is a Feather board without FeatherWings! This is the 8-Channel PWM or Servo​ FeatherWing, you can add 8 x 12-bit PWM outputs to your Feather board. Using Feather Stacking Headers or Feather Female Headers you can connect a FeatherWing on top or bottom of your Feather board and let the board take flight!

You want to make a cool robot, maybe a hexapod walker, or maybe just a piece of art with a lot of moving parts. Or maybe you want to drive a lot of LEDs with precise PWM output. What now? You could give up OR you could just get our handy PWM and Servo FeatherWing. It’s a lot like popular PWM/Servo Shield but with half the channels & squished into a nice small portable size and works with any of our Feather boards.

Since the FeatherWing only uses the I2C (SDA & SCL pins), it works with any and all Feathers! You can stack it with any other FeatherWing or with itself (just make sure you have each wing with a unique I2C address) .

Specs:

• There’s an I2C-controlled PWM driver with a built in clock. That means that, unlike the TLC5940 family, you do not need to continuously send it signal tying up your microcontroller, its completely free running!
• It is 5V compliant, which means you can control it from a 3.3V Feather and still safely drive up to 6V outputs (this is good for when you want to control white or blue LEDs with 3.4+ forward voltages)
• 6 address select pins so you can stack up to 62 of these on a single i2c bus, a total of 992 outputs – that’s a lot of servos or LEDs
• Adjustable frequency PWM up to about 1.6 KHz
• 12-bit resolution for each output – for servos, that means about 4us resolution at 60Hz update rate
• Configurable push-pull or open-drain output

We wrapped up this lovely chip into a FeatherWing with a couple nice extras:

• Terminal block for power input (or you can use the 0.1″ breakouts on the side)
• Reverse polarity protection on the terminal block input
• Green power-good LED
• Two groups of 4 outputs on either side, 8 total.
• Stackable design. You’ll need to pick up stacking headers and right angle 3×4 headers in order to stack on top of this shield without the servo connections getting in the way.
• A spot to place a big capacitor on the V+ line (in case you need it)
• 220 ohm series resistors on all the output lines to protect them, and to make driving LEDs trivial
• Solder jumpers for the 6 address select pins

This product comes with a fully tested and assembled wing as well as 2 pieces of 3×4 male straight header (for servo/LED plugs), a 2-pin terminal block (for power) and a stick of 0.1″ header so you can plug into a Feather. A little light soldering will be required to assemble and customize the board by attaching the desired headers but it is a 15 minute task that even a beginner can do.

Note: The terminal blocks included with your product may be blue or black.

TECHNICAL DETAILS