Controlling a robot arm using Arduino

Hi, I'm a total noob and have an Owi (edge) robot arm which uses 5 x 3V motors. The circuit board is damaged (my fault) so I want to use an Arduino Uno to control it.

I have 2 options, one is to control the existing motors but I'm confused how to do this as. I've seen that there are motor shields but they only seem to control up to 4 motors (in both directions) and I need to control 5, is it possible to plug 2 motor shields into each other or would I need to my own circuit using a breadboard?

The other option and the one I would prefer is to replace the existing motors with servos so I can create a feedback loop. Can these be plugged directly into the Arduino or do I need a shield and again would this be limited to 4 servos as it is with the motor.

I guess what I want to know is what parts I need to get started. I'm not stupid and once I have a starting point I should be able to sort it out myself (I hope).

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

Hey Kaine, you cannot use two motor shields stacked together since it would be using the same pins and interfere with each other.
You can use 3 of these mounted on a board but will have to make a special board using them: Store | Jaycon Systems

Servos would be a better option. You can easily control up to 12 servos with the basic Arduino. You wont need to buy a special shield for Servos but you will need to make a board to connect the signal wires from each servo to the Arduino and to supply power to all the servos.

Hope this helps!
Jay

Previous post about the arm. The easiest thing might be to fix the origional control switches and then operate them with small servos. check youtube for various servo based arms.

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&as_q=owi+arm+&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Farduino.cc%2Fforum&as_occt=any&safe=images&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=

Thanks for the replies.

I've bought an Arduino Uno and a starter kit so I'm going to have a play with the example scripts to get to grips with some simple stuff before getting too complicated.

I've also bought 5 mini servos, and it looks fairly easy to control them, but looks can be deceiving!