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Raspberry Pi Zero 2W Guide: Controlling the Motors

By Ayaan 3-10-25

This guide goes into the steps needed to enable I2C to be able to control motors from the Raspberry Pi.

1) Pull the files from GitHub

For our project, the files are located on GitHub at this link.

Make sure Git is installed.

sudo apt update
sudo apt install git -y

Navigate to the repository you want to clone the files to. Clone the Git repository. Here we will copy it to Desktop. 

cd ~/Desktop
git clone https://github.com/hransom528/ECECapstoneProject.git

2) Install Python dependencies

Be sure that Python is installed with:

sudo apt install python3 python3-venv python3-pip -y

Check if Python is installed with:

python3 --version

We can create and then activate a virtual Python environment called myvenv to install our dependencies. 

python3 -m venv myvenv
source myvenv/bin/activate

You should see a (myvenv) at the beginning of your terminal. For example, something like this: 

(myvenv) kali@kali-raspberry-pi-zero-2-w:~$

To reactivate your python environment, use this command: 

source ~Desktop/myvenv/bin/activate

To automatically enable your Python environment on startup, run this command:

echo "source ~/Desktop/myvenv/bin/activate" >> ~/.zshrc

If you're using a different shell (like bash), replace .zshrc with .bashrc.

To pull the latest updates from the repo, run this commmand:

git -C ~/Desktop/ECECapstoneProject pull

Note: It will overwrite any uncommitted changes made, so keep that in mind.

To automate this with a command called "updateproject", run this: 

alias updateproject='git -C ~/Desktop/ECECapstoneProject pull'

Now install the dependencies with: 

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt install python3-pip python3-smbus i2c-tools aircrack-ng wireshark net-tools nmap -y
pip3 install adafruit-blinka adafruit-circuitpython-motorkit RPi.GPIO

This command is going to take a while, so be patient.

3) Run the code

Navigate to the proper directory:

cd ECECapstoneProject

Now you can run the code! Let's run the control_movement.py in the motor-control directory: 

python3 motor-control/control_movement.py