Since my last post, I took some pictures of the hardware:
On either side of the box are the two motor-driven plastic gadgets – one is a red fan for floating a small Styrofoam ball, and the other is a yellow “robot bird” that flaps its wings and bobs its head.
The Raspberry Pi 2, and two breadboards are inside the box. The three LEDs are on the breadboard that is in the “front window” of the cardboard box.
In order to correctly wire up the motors to the Pi, I consulted with my electrical engineer friend Rob, and he advised me that because the motors in question use 3 volts each, I should use another board to control them. He recommended this board from Pololu, their DRV8835.
However, assembling the DRV8835 requires a bit of soldering, and uses the pins I am already using. So I need to move my existing pins around. By that, I mean connect most or all of my existing wiring to different pins on the GPIO connector, and then updating my app correspondingly. Also, I don’t think I want to plug the DRV8835 directly into the GPIO connector on the Raspberry Pi 2. Most likely, I will use some wires to connect it to one of the breadboards.