Asked — Edited

Motor Shield Help

I have a Anduino Motor shield and was wondering if any one could help me or or point me in the right direction ,heres the link. I have tired for day trying and no luck! Thanks Motor shield Link


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#1  

just a word to the wise....................................we don't use the "A' word on EZ-B........................

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Synthiam
#2  

I've never connected one of those to the EZ-B. But i'm sure it will be pretty straight forward according to those instructions. In ARC, use the HBridge Movement Panel. Select the pins that you chose for the movement. You can also select the PWM pins too:) That will be an easy add-on!

#3  

Thanks DJj, I got It going but now the issue I'm having is with the Movement Panel script. Is it possible to toggle 2 digital ports?t

Brazil
#4  

Hi... I'm also thinking about use an "A" motor shield.. I got two from sparkfun.. But since they are designed to fit as a shield on the "A" board... I have no idea how to hook that on ez-b... I intend to use that to drive two 12v dc motors that will give mobility to my prototype.. Can you help me ? Thanks

Brazil
#5  

Hi... I'm also thinking about use an "A" motor shield.. I got two from sparkfun.. But since they are designed to fit as a shield on the "A" board... I have no idea how to hook that on ez-b... I intend to use that to drive two 12v dc motors that will give mobility to my prototype.. Can you help me ? Thanks

This is the shield i'm talking about...

User-inserted image

User-inserted image

#6  

Hello, I have the same shield, no idea where to connect the signal wires. I've tried about everything I could think of... no result, at all. Has anyone succeeded in the meantime ?

#7  

I found this tutorial for a shield using the same chip and that seems to have the same architechture, I'm sending it in case someone more ingenious could make something out of it. It seems, however, that this shield will respond only to IDK programming through arduino board...

http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/use.html

United Kingdom
#8  

From a quick look...

DirA and DirB (12 & 13) look to be direction of the motor. Usually these work that high is one way and low the other. A simple Digital on/off (or Set(port,on/off)) should do that.

PWMA and PWMB (3 & 11) for speed control of each motor, PWM on each of the ports to set the speed.

BrakeA and BrakeB (8 & 9) to apply a brake to the motors (not really required), apply a high to these to instantly stop the motor.

That is assumption, check it out first. But it does look very much like the Dagu 4 motor controller. Check my cloud uploads for an example project for controlling these. There is a Dagu topic too which has more info in than I've put above...

Edit: added links.

Edit 2: Let me know how you get on with the above, I'm always interested in knowing if what I've advised has worked or not but often people don't give the feedback (for whatever reason).

#9  

Thanks a lot Rich. I couldn't get any motor to run using any of the pins. It worked though connecting the Dpins on the back of the board, directly to some entries of the chips but this is not the way I see the future of my project... Listen, I may need some light from you again : Do you know any way to reset / hard reset an EZB controller ? I have now something like 4 digital ports that don't send anymore juice and another board that won't connect at all after a short, while the LEDs (BT and main) are, respectively, blinking and blowing normally. Any idea ? This is my last EZB controller and it seems it's going to die at some point, like it happened to two others (one it was not my fault, it was dead right after I tried to use it for the first time).

How is it even possible that digital ports can't respond any longer, actually ?

Thanks a lot.

United Kingdom
#10  

That sounds like one for DJ to be honest, I know you can buy replacement chips for the EZ-B if you use the Contact Us page but not sure if that would solve the problems, it could be a different component gone on the board.

Also, while I'm replying, I looked in to the board a bit more and found this;

Quote:

Motors connections Brushed DC motor. You can drive two Brushed DC motors by connecting the two wires of each one in the (+) and (-) screw terminals for each channel A and B. In this way you can control its direction by setting HIGH or LOW the DIR A and DIR B pins, you can control the speed by varying the PWM A and PWM B duty cycle values. The Brake A and Brake B pins, if set HIGH, will effectively brake the DC motors rather than let them slow down by cutting the power. You can measure the current going through the DC motor by reading the SNS0 and SNS1 pins. On each channel will be a voltage proportional to the measured current, which can be read as a normal analog input, through the function analogRead() on the analog input A0 and A1. For your convenience it is calibrated to be 3.3V when the channel is delivering its maximum possible current, that is 2A.

Which basically translates to what I said above in my other post, plus a bit of info on the current sensors (connect A0 and A1 to 2 ADC ports and read them for the current if you want to, 3.3v = 2A, I'm too tired to work out the multiplier needed (it's 2:40am here).