Hello,
I recently built a robot that drives four motors from a Raspberry Pi via the Auto Phat. I wanted to run the motors at their rated voltage, and through the use of the Sparkfun Buck/boost converter I split the power to apply 5 volts to the raspberry pi, which worked excellently. I then applied the full 7.2 v power from the battery pack that I am using to the motor external power pin and the ground pin. at which point the monitor shut down the red and green lights on the pi turned on solidly, and sadly, I saw a wisp of smoke come out of the sd card. now I was under the impression that the external power inputs of the p hat should have been shielded from the main power circuit of the pi. As Raspberry pi’s are ridiculously expensive right now I would like to prevent this in the future.
