Hi Nick,
I just wanted to run some things past you and get your opinion.
So for the power supply of our rover (the motor shield and the arduino uno board) I'm using a 12 V 1300 mAh Sla battery which is run through a voltage regulator and so the output is a steady 9 V. This is then wired into both the Arduino and into the motor shield.
We are only running the two motor dagu 5 rover and hence we have two channels on the 4 channel motor shield unoccupied. We need to run a third dc motor to raise an lower a bridge but the stall current for the dc motor we have is 6.18 A (this is the motor http://www.mabuchi-motor.co.jp/cgi-bin/catalog/e_catalog.cgi?CAT_ID=fk_260sa). The manual for the shield says that a dc motor with stall current greater than 4.5 A should not be used, else we could damage the shield. My question is can we use this motor with the shield ensuring that we read the current pin for that channel and turning the dc motor off when the current exceeds, say 4 A?
Or can we somehow just hook it up through the arduino chip, bypassing the shield? Or do we need to get a motor with a lower stall current?
Thanks for your help.