Pca9685 adafruit servo pwm drivers

#1

Hello everyone,

After 1 week of intense frustartion using Ardublock, S4A, Visuino etc… I ended up in mBlock. I must admit is not the best, but is the most alive one. Although there are a lot a lot of libraries missing, it is still usable.

I know mBlock gives this software for free and therefore they try to promote their boards and aprts, etc.
But that can’t make a standard to not include the most used libraries in the ARDUINO world, specially when talking about servo motors.

How is possible after 5 years? there is no a single PCA9685 extension related?

Or I can’t find it, or no one has ever bothered.
I have started doing it, but I am a bit lost in terms of the block list creation part. How I am sure that block is how it should be?
I believe there should be a kind of discord chat, and a kind of google doc live, so someone can jump in the extension I am building and fix it.

I am creating it under the name PCA9685, and the famoues servo powm driver photo. Very intuitive to spot.

Pelase any advanced user doing extensions or understanding the block building part help me. As well if there is any developer out there that doesn’t mind to help.

If this extension gets done, I can tell you hundred of new users will come to use mBlocks.

#2

I have though about creating a driver this chip (I created 1 for Micropython a few years back) but I haven’t found the need to do so. I am using the Aguria board that comes with the ranger and it can drive 2 servos from each port digital port 6 to 10 that run the 5v rail using the block already provided. I did make my own driver to drive my HV servos from the motor ports 1 to 4 that have the battery voltage supplied to them (basically just wrapped up the ardunio servo library).

The upside is that there is a tool to wrap up the ardunio PCA9685 library and create your own blocks see https://ext.mblock.cc/#/exts/device

#3

Yes I did start to do that, but is just so painfull and not easy to do. That guide doesn’t cover more than the basics, but to call the functions and define all the blocks from the extension I need something more than the guide they provide.
Thanks a lot for being the first comment, please help me to gather more attetion so someone with more knoweldege comes and help us.
Unless I am missing something, waht I am doing is not as easy as inserting a sensor, or a sttper motor drivers like the bridge, it is a little more complex because it only can be used with the adafruit libraries to work at it’s maximum.
Just have in mind that the PCA9685 has 2 inputs genrally that are used the SCL and SDA and then it has 16 servo motors outputs… So that is incredible tricky to think about doing as a block, specially for begginer users like me in mBlock.
This would so easy and fast to solve if mBlock did have any sort of partnership or colaboration with Adafruit.
At the moment adafruit is developing a sort of block code program with micrsoft for the microbit hardware of microsoft. So I can imagine that maybe microsoft have some sort of exclusivity over Adafruit things? who knows.
By the way the blocks froma dafruit in codeblocks from microsoft only goes to the leds ones, the led controlelrs and that stuff, but nothing from servos.