I have a code to make a motor run then sleep, then run again, but can't get it to work

Question

I need to make a motor run for an amount of time, sleep for an amount of time, then repeat making an infinite loop

from adafruit_motorkit import MotorKit
import time

kit = MotorKit()

while True:
    endtime = time.time() + 60 # runs motor for 60 seconds
    while time.time() < endtime:
            kit.motor1.throttle = 1
            pass
    print('endtime passed')
    time.sleep(10)
    print('done sleeping')

I'm expecting the motor to run for a minute, give the endtime passed message, and sleep for 10 seconds, but the motor never sleeps. I'm new to python so I don't know much about this and any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

You need to set the throttle back to 0 before calling time.sleep.
time.sleep will only pause the process for the given time, you need to explicitly tell the motor to stop moving.

Example:

while True:
    endtime = time.time() + 60 # runs motor for 60 seconds
    while time.time() < endtime:
            kit.motor1.throttle = 1
            pass
    print('endtime passed')
    kit.motor1.throttle = 0
    time.sleep(10)
    print('done sleeping')

Also you don't have to busy-wait the 60 seconds the motor is running, you can just set the throttle on the motor and then call time.sleep:

from adafruit_motorkit import MotorKit
import time

kit = MotorKit()

while True:
    print('running motor')
    kit.motor1.throttle = 1
    time.sleep(60)

    print('pausing 10 seconds')
    kit.motor1.throttle = 0
    time.sleep(10)
    print('done sleeping')