Hi, so I am looking to connect about 6 stepper motors to my Arduino Uno r3 (Is that too much power for one little board?) and I came across the terms motor drivers and motor shields. Could somebody please explain to me the difference? And could you also explain how to wire the shields, drivers and the Arduino correctly?
Yes, by sevral orders of magnitude too big.
A shield plugs into all the pins of an Arduino, completely covering it. It is a mechanical way of construction.
A driver is the electronics that convert the weak signals from an Arduino into the strong (high current and normally higher voltage) signal needed to drive the motor.
This driver may be on a separate board or contained in the electronics on a shield.
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You can buy shields. Adaptors and modules are not shields, you have to jumper to them. They tend to cost a lot less, board real estate cost$!
To extend a controller:
You can hang I2C devices on a long I2C bus.
You can hang SPI devices on a short/fast SPI bus -- including daisy-chained serial<-->parallel "pin multiplier" chips, 1 AVR can run 100's of things together as long as none block the rest from running often -- and we try to teach that here, it simplifies the crud out of automation.
6 steppers would take up 12 IO pins if directly connected which is a good chunk of the Unos available pins. Depending on what else you need, consider using a Mega.
You could use SPI connected stepper drivers, although I am not sure how many stepper libraries can use them. That may not be a problem if you have simple movement requirements that don't need a library.
As it happens, I am currently designing a serial stepper driver board for 8 steppers.
I very much doubt if you can find anything cheaper on Amazon compared to other sources. This oft quoted cheap prices on Amazon is one of the biggest "porky pies" around.
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what then is the purpose of shields?
thanks for the help!
Amazon doesn't support what you bought,
sites like Polulu provide support. Sparkfun, Adafruit, Yourduino all have loads of how-to support. They make a comfy niche to be in.
If you want to save, it will be in bulk deals, small quantity each is high.
When the FET I wanted was 80 cents for 1, I paid $10 for 60.
What are you buying? Where are you shopping?
See what's still open, the market has not recovered.
They contain the electronics you need on the shield, providing it is the right shield, and they conveniently connect all the pins to your Arduino without having to wire an individual driver board with wires to the Arduino.
Also with shields you can stack them, plugging a different shield to do some other function on top of the first shield, which is plugged into the Arduino. This extra shield must be compatible with the first shield, that is not to use any of the same pins as the first.
So it is convenient, and you get secure wiring, because plugging a single wire into an Arduino is not a very physically robust thing to do.
Tell them to shop around. Until they MAKE, their view remains BUY.
Until you SHOP you won't know why!
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