I recently purchased the adafruit motorshield shown in the attached picture. I would like to add an external power source but am confused. I only see a PWR and i have no idea how i would plug something into it. EXT_PWR seems pretty straightforward but i just dont know how i would plug something into it. Any ideas?
http://www.ladyada.net/make/mshield/use.html
If you would like to have 2 seperate DC power supplies for the Arduino and motors. Plug in the supply for the Arduino into the DC jack, and connect the motor supply to the PWR_EXT block. Make sure the jumper is removed from the motor shield.
That's a quote from the page - replete with misspelling and sentence fragment.
[edit - formatting]
Ok thank you? Sorry for the noob quetion, but what is the jumper?
I want to say the one labelled "PWR", but.. I'm not so sure.
They referred to a JP1, but there's no such label on the board.
I don't even know if I can trust their schematic (X1, X2, but what about M!-4?) at this point.
It's that bad. I could drop an F-Bomb.
If the shield is plugged in, powered, and with nothing parked on the 2-pin "PWR" header, is there any voltage at EXT_PWR?
Of course, you could log in over at
http://forums.adafruit.com/
rustle around, it may have been discussed already, or pose a question.
It's not as active as it is here, but it's worth a shot.
So, I was looking at the adafruit forum
http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=26873
There's a pic, shows a header that's labelled "power jumper"!
Here it is with the jumper (shunt) placed
Here it is with the jumper off
Is that the same board as yours? [Yours in your original pic and the version ref'd here look different to me.]
I like adafruit a lot, but their documentation isn't all it should be.
Adafruit's docs are fine. That's not an Adafruit motor shield.
I had to take our friend's word for it.
Still, aren't the pics in my immediately previous post different from the board shown on their "Make It!" page?
I think there are at least to two Revs of this board.