Hello, I am wondering which Arduino board would be best suited to stack 4 Adafruit motor shields in order to operate 7 stepper motors. These stepper motors will control hinges that fold the seams of a small piece of furniture made out of plastic, requiring a decent amount of torque. Anyone help or input would be greatly appreciated.
Are those shields stackable? My assumption is no.
If they where designed for Arduino, then it likely uses the default pin configuration of the Uno (the original), although a lot of other boards are designed to use the same layout ex. Leonardo. They use the same pin layout but in some special applications the pin functions will differ.
Based on my assumption, you will likely need 4 boards for 4 shields, if you want them to talk to each other you'll need to use serial or I2C if the pins aren't taken by the shield.
More detail will get a better answer.
Thank you for replying. The shields are stackable and are compatible with the Arduino Uno, Leonardo, Due, Mega R3 and more. ( Overview | Adafruit Motor Shield V2 | Adafruit Learning System ) Will one of those boards be best for what I am doing?
My guess is that any board will work that has a compatible pin arrangement, but I don't know what pins the shields use and what type of signals they require to function.
I'm trying to think of how you could stack 4 identical shields and control 4 different motors off the same pins. Does it use I2C? In that case the I2C pins are different between Uno and some models like Leonardo.
Not enough information to really give a proper guess.
I think any will work. I have a UNO with one motor shield and it works great. It uses only the SDA & SCL pins and you can stack several of them together. Keep in mind that it supports 1.2A per channel and 3A peak and two servos per shield. Also you need to buy stackable pins to solder.