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Step 9Electronics - Motorshield
The motorshield is usually supplied as a kit, it's easy to solder up, follow the instructions on the Adafruit site. It's brilliant. I am an Adafruit fanboy, so sue me. Not much more to say about it.
The motorshield has two stepper motor ports, one on either side. It takes it's power from the host arduino, but has an separate connector that you can use to connect an external power supply. If you have a power supply that has bare leads, you can screw them in here (make sure you get the polarity right) use this and remove the power jumper from beside it. I'm going to stress that the power connector is wires up properly - +V on the left hand wire, GND on the right. There is no reverse polarity protection on this board, so if you do it wrong it's likely you'll damage the board, and maybe your arduino too.
If you don't use it, you should plug your external power supply directly into your arduino, and leave the power jumper ON. I am wiring directly, because it's better practice to have entirely separate supplies for motor and logic, and also because the Seeeduinos have a funky JST power connector on them that doesn't fit anything standard.
I also added little heat sinks to the driver chips (L293Ds) on the motorshield. They get hot, and you can use a fan to cool them if you have one spare, and really, I don't know if they every really get dangerous, but with heatsinks on I feel a more comfortable letting them run for hours and hours.
The motorshield has two stepper motor ports, one on either side. It takes it's power from the host arduino, but has an separate connector that you can use to connect an external power supply. If you have a power supply that has bare leads, you can screw them in here (make sure you get the polarity right) use this and remove the power jumper from beside it. I'm going to stress that the power connector is wires up properly - +V on the left hand wire, GND on the right. There is no reverse polarity protection on this board, so if you do it wrong it's likely you'll damage the board, and maybe your arduino too.
If you don't use it, you should plug your external power supply directly into your arduino, and leave the power jumper ON. I am wiring directly, because it's better practice to have entirely separate supplies for motor and logic, and also because the Seeeduinos have a funky JST power connector on them that doesn't fit anything standard.
I also added little heat sinks to the driver chips (L293Ds) on the motorshield. They get hot, and you can use a fan to cool them if you have one spare, and really, I don't know if they every really get dangerous, but with heatsinks on I feel a more comfortable letting them run for hours and hours.
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