The BBB and RPi can be considered "controllers" in this aspect. Lets say you want to use your BBB to turn on/off a 5v fan.
What you do is wire up a circuit with 5v going to a fan, with a NPN transistor in the middle. Even better would be an opto-isolator. The transistor/opto-isolator would have the 5v source and Fan on the Collector, and ground connected to the Emitter. Then you would connect up the Base of the transistor to a GPIO pin with a suitable resistor of course. You don't need much current to trigger the transistor. Then when you want to turn on the fan, then turn on the GPIO pin. You would of course, want a diode around the fan etc to limit any electromagnetic "backwash" etc. There are many pages on the internet that will tell you how to and why you should do this. They explain it a lot better than I ever could. Jerry On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 4:24 PM, Gerald Coley <[email protected]> wrote: > Uh. No. The I/O are 3.3V and they can deliver about 6 mA maximum. > > Gerald > > > > On Thu, Jul 3, 2014 at 4:42 PM, 3DFruitBat <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Hey! I've got kind of a nebulous project in mind for this summer, and was >> wondering whether the Beagle Bone Black can easily power a normal computer >> fan. I have some extra 3-pins laying around, and have some kinda stupid >> ideas for how to use them. I've been told that the Raspberry Pi can't >> supply enough power using GPIO, and wondered if the 'Bone is up to it >> off-the-shelf. Since these things are just simple 5v fans, I'm sure this >> question will sound silly to many, but i'm really new to electrical work >> and micro controllers. Any help you can offer is appreciated. >> >> -- >> For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss >> --- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "BeagleBoard" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. >> > > -- > For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "BeagleBoard" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- Extra Ham Operator: K7AZJ Registered Linux User: 275424 Raspberry Pi and Arduino developer There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who can read binary and those who can't. -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
