DC Motor not responding to GPIO Motor

Question

I want to control 4 DC Motors from a Raspberry Pi. I am just starting by making sure that 1 motor can be controlled. I am following this guide: https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/physical-computing/14, which explains the wiring configuration for the motor control board to the motor, and how to use the Motor class in the gpiozero library.

I have connected the Motor Control Board powered by dual H-bridge IC L293D http://shop.sb-components.co.uk/products/motorshield-for-raspberry-pi to the Raspberry Pi, and the battery box to the motor control board (switched on). When directly connecting my DC motor to the battery box, the motor spins very fast, so I know that it works. The motor has 2 wires (black and red) which I connect to the holes for Motor 1 on the motor control board as follows:

I am also following the pin documentation for the motor control board:

After everything is connected, I run the following code on the Raspberry Pi (using user Vadim's suggestion):

from gpiozero import Motor

motor1 = Motor(forward=15, backward=13, enable=11)

while True:
    motor1.forward()

However, the motor does not move at all. I was a bit confused by the pin description, as I am not sure what the distinction between 'enable' and 'control' is, as they have a total of 3 GPIO pins (11, 13, and 15), but I have only 2 wires on my motor.

However, I have tried every combination of GPIO values into my code above: Motor(11, 15, 13), Motor(15, 11, 13), Motor(13, 11, 15), etc. None of them get the motor to move. Am I missing something? Should I be directly connecting the motor wires to the pins of the motor controller board? Or something else?

Answer 1

I found out that what needed to be done was to convert Broadcom numbers to GPIO numbers on the Raspberry Pi, as hinted in user joan's comment.

After following this mapping: https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2012/09/checking-your-raspberry-pi-board-version/, the code needed to make the motor run was simply:

from gpiozero import Motor

motor1 = Motor(22, 27)

while True:
    motor1.forward()

Answer 2

You might find the actual gpiozero documentation for motor clearer although Robot might be more appropriate.

Answer 3

You have 3-pin controller board so you should initialize your Motor class with enable pin, e.g. for Motor1:

motor1 = Motor(forward=15, backward=13, enable=11)

Since you got the "Motorshield" you may want to have a look at its documentation and TestMotor.py at their GitHub. It uses PyMotor.py form the same repo as a "driver", so you may want to use it as an alternative.