eBay vendor 4tronix, (@4tronix_uk) who have proved themselves to be very good at customer service (just ask @gadgetoid or myself!) and super-fast on delivery have just released the PiRoCon – a GPIO robot controller plugin board.

It has the following features:

• 5V 1.5A regulator to power the robot and the Pi from 6V to 9V batteries
• LED indication of 5V and 3.3V power status
• Dual H-Bridge driver to drive 2 DC motors (or 2 sets of 2 if using paired motors on each side of the robot)
• 8 bi-directional level-shifted GPIO signals
• All GPIO signals have 3-pin connectors (power, ground and signal)
• 4-pin male header to directly plug in an Ultrasonic distance sensor. Only uses a single pin on the Raspberry Pi GPIO
• If you don’t like the default pin allocations for anything, simply remove the relevant jumper and use jumper wires to connect to your preferred signal
• 2 of the GPIO connectors can be used as servo drivers
• Expansion board support. This is provided via the I2C bus and the expansion boards can be stackable – add as many as you like!

1. Currently available is a 16-channel servo/PWM driver board
2. Coming soon: analogue I/O expansion, 16/32 digital I/O expansion, LED indicator board, LCD Display

• Includes mounting pillar and screws so it can be securely mounted to your Raspberry Pi (rev B only) – no more expansion boards flapping in the breeze!
• All of this is directly supported in Scratch GPIO 3.0 onwards – many thanks to Simon Walters (@cymplecy) for some excellent work

The board will set you back just under £20 which is excellent value for a robot board. I can’t afford one myself right now but I would buy one if I could as the feature set alone makes it worth the money, in my opinion.

It does require some soldering (as you can see from the contents picture above) but nothing you should worry about too much as all the surface-mounting is done for you already.

Read more and order from eBay here

I have no affiliation with 4tronix aside from being a satisfied customer!