I purchased a few items wanting to break into the stepper motor realm of Uno. My invoice # was 490539. I attempted to get the board programmed in and the hardware hooked up. After probably two weeks of loading and unloading drivers and software and moving the software around and trying to modify the programs for the different ports as well as trying motors and stepper motors in every location, I deduced that I must have a bad motor shield. I was monitoring the example program and realized it stopped at the first motor command. That was a big hint. I ordered a second motor shield on invoice 511945. I put it on the Uno and loaded the example program and it worked immediately. If you have never had a problem with a motor shield, I suppose I just eat the first one, however I took prudent care of the board and to the best of my knowledge did not do anything that should cause a board to completely fail straight out of the box. Having said that, I started off thinking the shield stacking headers were just plug in. I then soldered them in. Still nothing. Please advice. Thank you, Tom
I'm afraid I can't figure out how to send photos. The red error message above says the file is too big. max allowed size is 1MiB. If that is the same as 1MB I'll have to change settings on my camera to have such small file sizes. Something is not right. Please advise. Tom
Motor Shield
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Motor Shield
Last edited by tomu on Wed Jul 09, 2014 10:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Motor Shield
Tom, could you post pictures of both sides of the board for us to see? Thanks.
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Re: Motor Shield
attempting to send picture for nth time
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Re: Motor Shield
You can use the "Choose File" and Add the File" buttons below the message editing window. If you re-size them to 800x600 before uploading, you should have no problems. You can resize in most photo processing programs. If not, there are several on-line resizing services.
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Re: Motor Shield
I don't see a picture when I view message sent.?
I go down to file Browse... I high lite the Jpeg file I press open I then press the ADD THE FILE bar. Idon't anything indicating that the picture loads. I then press submit. I dropped the size of the files and I'm not seeing the the file > 1MiB message. I attached a file to this
I go down to file Browse... I high lite the Jpeg file I press open I then press the ADD THE FILE bar. Idon't anything indicating that the picture loads. I then press submit. I dropped the size of the files and I'm not seeing the the file > 1MiB message. I attached a file to this
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Re: Motor Shield
Not sure what the problem is there. It is working fine for me here. You might also try uploading to Drop-Box or one of the other free photo sharing sites and post the links here.
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Re: Motor Shield
Because of all the difficulties I'll try to submit one picture at a time.
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Re: Motor Shield
top view. Looks like hours of trying finally pays off.
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Re: Motor Shield
From what I can see, the critical solder joints look good. But the photos are too dark to see much else.
There seems to be a darkened area on the top of the M3/M4 H-bridge and the PCA9685 chip as well. Can we get a detail view of that part of the board with a little more light?
There seems to be a darkened area on the top of the M3/M4 H-bridge and the PCA9685 chip as well. Can we get a detail view of that part of the board with a little more light?
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Re: Motor Shield
Not sure you need another photo for that. There is discolartion on the IC chips from overspreay of electronic cleaner I used to remove the flux. If you still want a picture I'll get it to you.
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Re: Motor Shield
That sounds like a reasonable explanation. Sometimes we see dark spots on bridge chips that have overheated. But those are typically smaller than what you have there.
Please post the code that you are using to test the board.
Please post the code that you are using to test the board.
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Re: Motor Shield
I never got past example programs. I used "motor party". I recall changing the code to try all the channels with both the stepper motor and a dc motor. No channel did anything. I also used "steppertest" and "dcmotor test". Not in that particular order. No sign of life came from running either of them as they were once I loaded them or after simple modifications. Regardless, the same programs I tryed to use on the first motor shield worked perfectly fine on my second purchase.
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Re: Motor Shield
Please post the code that you are using to test the board. There is more than one version of the library.
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Re: Motor Shield
Do you normally just hound people until they just get discourged and quite for the$30?
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