first time poster. Sorry in advance if this is the wrong place/title/etc.
I'm currently working on a senior design project for mechanical engineering, but it requires some basic electronic controls. This is definitely out of my expertise, but I'm hoping the idea is simple enough that I can get through it.
The quick run-down: Motorized wheelchair, with two powered motors for moving around, and two linear actuators that lift or extend parts of the frame, but without overextending and breaking anything. I need to run 4 electric motors independently. Two (wheels) will receive commands from a bi-axial joystick, run through Python on a Raspberry Pi 3, and two (actuators) will operate with "on-off" buttons, with sensors that operate as kill-switches (again, using the Python program).
I'm fairly certain that I won't have the know-how to actually create my own controller/boards, so I'm relying on rigging things together with existing parts. Obviously price is a major factor in what is available for use. Current plan is to have the joystick signals coming in through USB, use two of these HATs to control the actual motors from my 24VDC power supply, and presumably attach sensors to remaining GPIO pins so the Python code will know when to shut-down power outputs.
Does this seem like a relatively do-able setup? Am I correct in assuming that I can use multiple HATs (I'm aware they probably won't stack nicely) as long as I use different GPIO pins from the RPi and connect everything with jumper wires? The HAT user manual shows only 4 GPIO pins being used, so theoretically I should have plenty left over to work with? Anything horribly obvious that I've overlooked and failed to account for? Thanks in advance for any help or advice that you may have.
