Shield – CIAOPS Labs

Video URL = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed9reoDO2EA

Now that I have my Arduino Uno R4 Wifi connected to the Internet and Adafruit.io, the next challenge is to get the wheels turning so to speak.

To do this I need a motor driver and wanted one that would easily connect to the Arduino Uno R4 Wifi without too much soldering. I therefore chose:

Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino v2 Kit – v2.3

the instructions for this board are here:

Adafruit Motor Shield V2

and the software library is here:

Adafuit_Motor_Shield_V2_Library

however. it turns out that I should have also bought:

Shield stacking headers for Arduino (R3 Compatible)

but I’ll come back to that.

With the headers soldered into place, I could then insert the Adafuit Motor Shield directly onto the Arduino Uno R4 Wifi as shown above.

I then uploaded the following code to the Arduino Uno R4 Wifi:

https://github.com/directorcia/Azure/blob/master/Iot/Arduino%20Uno%20R4%20Wifi/Adafruit%20Motor%20Shield%20V3/test-motors.cpp

to test all the motors. The results of this are shown in the video at the top.

Using the ‘vibe’ coding and with thanks to Github Copilot, getting the results I wanted was really easy. It even installed the Adafuit_Motorshield drivers for me as well.

Now I know the shield works along with the all the motors. The next was to be to get the DFRobot 1602 LCD display working on teh Arduino Uno R4 Wifi. It was then I realised that I should have used the:

Shield stacking headers for Arduino (R3 Compatible)

as I now didn’t have an easy way to connect the display. Damm! I’ll need to figure something else out to get the display working with the board. However, I am very pleased that the Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino v2 Kit – v2.3 works well and all the motors on my chassis are all operational again. I am now back to where I was with the S32 controller over a year ago.

If you haven’t worked out yet, I’m trying to get back to this point:

Mecanum motion

but with a more compact controller and motor driver.

One of the issues I found when powering the servos for the robot arm was that I found I couldn’t power them from the Arduino board, I needed an external power supply. This fact made wiring the servos up challenging as the control signal still had to come from the Arduino but the power elsewhere. Thus, lots of messy wires.

All that has been solved with the addition of a Keyestudio Sensor Shield/Expansion board as seen above.

Basically, the shield simply plugs into the pins in the Arduino controller (extending them) while providing:

– An alternate power supply

– Easy connections for all the servos

A nice compact solution to a few challenges with the robot arm. All I needed to do was connect up the shield onto the Arduino and then connect the servo motors directly to their ports and change nothing else. No code or other wiring was done except to also connect an external power supply to the shield board as seen in the lower right above.

I have to say, that if you need to control devices that require more power than the standard Arduino board can provide then this type of shield is exactly what you want!

Thumbs up to Keyestudio for both the controller:

KEYESTUDIO UNO R3 Development Board For Arduino Official Upgrated Version With Pin Header Interface

and the shield

Keyestudio Sensor Shield/Expansion Board V5 for Arduino

A diagram of the project looks like:

Tag: Shield

Arduino Uno R4 Wifi Wheel test

Keyestudio Sensor Shield/Expansion Board V5 for Arduino