The library comes with a few examples to get you started up fast. We suggest getting started with the DC motor example. You can use any DC motor that can be powered by 6V-12VDCFirst, restart the IDE to make sure the new library is loaded. Plug the shield into the Arduino and connect a DC motor to motor port 1 - it does not matter which wire goes into which terminal block as motors are bi-directional. Connect to the top two terminal ports, do not connect to the middle pin (GND) See the photo below for the red and blue wire example. Be sure to screw down the terminal blocks to make a good connection!
One of the cool things about this shield design is that it is possible to stack shields. Every shield you stack can control another 2 steppers or 4 DC motors (or a mix of the two)You can stack up to 32 shields for a total of 64 steppers or 128 DC motors! Most people will probably just stack two or maybe three but hey, you never know. (PS if you drive 64 steppers from one of these shields send us a photo, OK?)Note that stacking shields does not increase the servo connections - those are hard-wired to the Arduino digital 9 & 10 pins. If you need to control a lot of servos, you can use our 16-channel servo shield and stack it with this shield to add a crazy large # of servos.Stacking shields is very easy. Each shield you want to stack on top of must have stacking headers installed. Check our instructions for how to do so. The top shield does not have to have stacking headers unless you eventually want to put something on top of it.The only thing to watch for when stacking shields is every shield must have a unique I2C address. The default address is 0x60. You can adjust the address of the shields to range from 0x60 to 0x7F for a total of 32 unique addresses.
Friday Fun: Simone Does Strange Things With Motors and Servos
I'll preface this by saying that I don't own the AutoDriver, but I'm a physics graduate student that just finished building something that required precise, reproducible, automated control of some stepper motors so I have some perspective on the topic. I originally bought an Arduino stepper motor shield from another company because it was cheaper and looked easier to use, but if I had to do things over I would without a doubt go with the AutoDriver.The AutoDriver can only control a single motor, which makes it much more expensive at $37 each, but you get a lot for your money. This board keeps track of your current position, allows you to set a "home" position, tells you when the motor is moving (via the "busy" pin), and lots of other advanced features. A lot of these things I had to implement in my own C++ library for the Arduino using the shield I bought. Did I mention it has stall detection? When you're using a beefy stepper motor with a ton of torque, you don't want to worry that a bug in your hastily thrown together code will let the motor blow through it's home position and destroy the delicate insides of your scientific equipment that's "ask for a quote first" level expensive. 2ff7e9595c
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