Motor Shield

Peter’s friend Will was over today. One of the things they did was to assemble a motor shield for Peter’s Arduino.

An Arduino has a bunch of output pins, but they aren’t powerful enough to drive motors. The motor shield adds a couple of H-bridge chips that let you drive up to an amp or so of output. It can drive 2 servos, 4 DC motors, or 2 stepper motors.

Here’s what it looked like when it was all done.

That’s a little hobby servo it’s driving back and forth with this simple program.

#include 

Servo servo1;

void setup() {
  Serial.begin(9600);
  Serial.println("Servo test");
  servo1.attach(10);
}

void loop() {
  Serial.print("tick");
  servo1.write(180);
  delay(1000);

  Serial.print("tock");
  servo1.write(0);
  delay(1000);
}

The instructions which come with the motor shield say you need to download and install a library to use a servo motor, but that’s actually included in the current version of the Arduino software. It’s really easy to do neat motor tricks with an Arduino. Next we need to connect a sensor at the same time. We’ve got force sensors and a motion detector. The instructions say that the motion sensor is not guaranteed to work on zombies though.