waveshare 2-DOF Pan-Tilt HAT for Raspberry Pi Series Board Light Intensity Sensing Control Camera Movement I2C Interface

To me, this is adequate for the price. I feel an improvement or two can be made. if the wires plugged into the topside that would be nice. To center it requires unplugging from the rpi and removing a screw, the screwing and reconnecting the rpi. Maybe unavoidable, but a few written tips in the docs might have helped me get it right the first time. I would pay a little more for a hardware change that, without having to disconnect from the IO pins, would let me loosen something. rotate the pan or tilt, then tighten it back up. here’s where having the power wires connect in to the top would come in handy, because the centering operation requires power off , adjust, power on in that order so when the controller wakes up, the camera is centered

The other reviews aren't wrong, this isn't very straightforward to use. However, if you can sort through a few things, it is actually a nice little HAT for a Pi. First, look at the board itself. It will tell you about what you have. It doesn't necessarily line up with the product description. For example, I spent a ton of time trying to get the TSL2581FN light sensor. My board came with a TSL25911 sensor. Once I figured that out and found an appropriate library to drive it, it worked flawlessly. I'm also using this on a Pi 4, and I had a *considerable* challenge getting their C demo code to compile and run properly. The bcm2835 libraries, though compiled to the specification on the website, continually locked up the I2C bus on the Pi. As an alternative, I grabbed the Adafruit PCA9685 Python libraries and wrote a test and alignment code fairly easily. The Waveshare website is apparently written by non-native English speaking and that makes it rough. If you can hack some things together, this is definitely worth a look. I plan on doing a further technical write up and will update with a link at some point in the future.

the servos are clone "tower pro" servos and they suck! I assembled everything and one servo kind of worked and the other didnt. I am upset I wasted hours of my life on this product and i can not get them back. you get what you pay for and this is junk. it uses I2C and not GPIO pins for server control. the only good thing is the mount for the servos... horrible instructions on how to put it together, but at least that was functional...

The online manual wiki starts off decent, then steadily worsens with increasingly broken English and misspelled critical Linux commands. Instructions also point to repositories that no longer even exist. The device itself might work fine for all I know - I can't make sense of the instructions, and online forum mentions are nonexistent except for people venting their frustration. Probably because there aren't enough suckers like me who will waste an entire day fighting with this hot mess.

i know they work as when i plug in my pi it moves butthe software to activate and use is not all there i cannot download some files from repositoryso i will look into this