Strange behavior with if() statements on Uno using Adafruit motor shield

Using Arduino Programming Questions
1

Okay, I have been tearing my hair out trying to get this project to work for a little over a week. I am working on an Uno, using the 0022 IDE and drivers in Vista and 7. I thought it best to put it here because of what it's doing.

I have been trying (and failing) to get my board to play nice with an Adafruit motor shield. This is supposed to be the driving force (no pun intended) behind a robot that I am trying to build. I can get one if/else statement to behave beautifully, but if I add anything more than that, and it ignores the conditions of every one but the first, resulting in a ton of garbage coming out (I have been trying to debug it one loop at a time, . The directional input was originally supposed to be given by means of five momentary switches for simplicity's sake. I have tried separate if/else statements, if/else if, switch/case arguments, switching pins, and quite frankly I'm at a loss as to what could be going wrong. The motor that I'm using to test the code is a vibration motor salvaged from an off-branded Nintendo Gamecube controller.

I'll upload the code in a little bit, once I get on to my other computer.

2

Here is the latest attempt at the code.

/*

  • most successful attempt yet, out of 5 tries
    */
    #include <AFMotor.h>

AF_DCMotor motor1(1);
//AF_DCMotor motor2(2);

void setup()
{
pinMode(2,INPUT);
pinMode(5,INPUT);
pinMode(6,INPUT);
pinMode(9,INPUT);
pinMode(10,INPUT);
Serial.begin(9600);
motor1.setSpeed(100);
Serial.println("Motor 1 initialized");
//motor2.setSpeed(200);
//Serial.println("Motor 2 initialized");

}
void loop()
{
int forward=digitalRead(2),back=digitalRead(5),left=digitalRead(6),right=digitalRead(9),power=digitalRead(10);
if(power!=LOW)
{
motor1.run(RELEASE);
//motor2.run(RELEASE);
}

else if(power==LOW)
{
/*if(forward==LOW)
{
//Serial.println("Moving forward...");
motor1.run(FORWARD);
// motor2.run(FORWARD);
}
/else
{
motor1.run(RELEASE);
//motor2.run(RELEASE);
Serial.println("Stopping...");
}/
/else/ if(back==LOW)
{
motor1.run(BACKWARD);
}
else
{
motor1.run(BRAKE);
}
}
else
{
motor1.run(RELEASE);
}
}

3

For a start, omitting the commented-out code it looks like this:

  if(power!=LOW)
  {
    motor1.run(RELEASE);
  }

  else if(power==LOW)
  {
    // testing back
  }
  else
  {
    motor1.run(RELEASE);
  }

You have 3 cases here which don't make sense at all:

  • If power is not low
  • If power is low
  • Some third case (power is neither low, nor not low) - this will never happen

I would start by reworking that along these lines:

  if (power != LOW)
  {
    motor1.run(RELEASE);
  }

// here if power is low
  else
  {
    if (back==LOW)
     {
      motor1.run(BACKWARD);
     }
    else
     {
      motor1.run(BRAKE);
     }
  }  // end power low
4

Gave that a try; no dice. Tried changing pins and switches, as well. It works fine if I'm checking the values for going forward, but for some reason it is being unnecessarily obtuse when I try to go backward.

I looked at the circuit, and I noticed that if I touched a voltmeter to pin 5, the motor started behaving. Damnedest thing. I still haven't begun to figure out how to use that to my advantage.

Edit: Screw it - I think one of my last experiments may have blown some of the pins. I already had another Uno coming for a different project, so I'm going to try it with some virgin hardware.

5

Okay, it's something with the board, but not with the ATMega chip. Fired up the new board, and it presented the same symptoms, so I poked around with the code.

My code calls for digital pins 2,5,6,9,and 10 to be initialized as inputs. I tried changing the pin that turned the motor on, and discovered that pins 2 and 10 are the only ones that actually behave. I have no idea how to proceed further.

6

You are using motor 1, right?

AF_DCMotor motor1(1);

As I read the code, motor 1 uses pins 2 and 3:

#define MOTOR1_A 2
#define MOTOR1_B 3

But you make pin 2 an input:

pinMode(2,INPUT);

I'm no expert on motor drivers, but won't that be a conflict?

7

Actually, that is the input that I actually can make work, so I'm not entirely sure it's a conflict. I'm checking now against the list on the Adafruit forums, but I believe that pin is not used.

Okay, so pin 2 isn't used, but pins 5 and 6, which are both supposed to be used for input, are supposed to be used for motors 3 and 4, which aren't used. I'm wondering if that could cause some kind of funky interference?

8

Okay, I have found one way to fix my problem (going to try turning on the internal pull-up resistors later on in hopes that will solve the original problem) - I just connected the input from pin 5 to pin A0, and added the following line:

back=analogRead(A0);

Suddenly, it works now. It needs some debouncing, if my diagnosing skills are correct, but it works.

Thanks to everyone that tried to help.