Hey I'm new but I was wondering if it's possible to connect a mini 8 keyed keypad to arduino l293d with 2 keys controlling each motor (each one for forward or backward direction) for 4 motors in total. I am trying to connect the keypad directly to the arduino so that I don't have to carry a laptop/computer everytime I need to use the machine. The plan is to make it as portable as possible.
Always show us a good schematic of your proposed circuit.
Give links to components.
Arduino motor shield : Amazon.com
Arduino Uno : Amazon.com
Keypad : Amazon.com
The keypad that you linked to appears to have a USB interface and as such cannot be interfaced to the Uno
You could, however, use 8 standard pushbuttons with the Keypad library
Does that mean battery power? If so, the ancient technology L29x DC motor drivers are not a great choice for battery powered projects since they drop 2V to over 4V of the motor power supply as waste heat.
YES, with thought and planning.
Answers above point out the major issues, your code will be another layer.
Feel free to keep this thread updated with your progress, we’ll try to help get your code running.
I'm basically planning on having 4 motors and and using a 4x2 keypad to control them into either direction. Any ideas on what components I could use and how?
my initial plan was based off of this video right here.
So I did some more research and found out that you can stack shields on arduino and discovered the USB Host Shield as well. Now my question is, in what order should I stack the shields? I have a ardunio uno, adafruit motor shield v2, and an arduino usb host shield.
Have you made sure that the 2 boards do not use the same pins as one another except for any common bus connections such as I2C or SPI ?
Do you want to connect and program a USB host just for the sake of connecting 8 buttons? Is it really impossible to choose among dozens of keyboards compatible with Arduino, for example these:
Another alternative that uses only 2 pins to interface a keypad like is shown in post #11 of @b707 is the I2C enabled keypad. Using a PCF8574 I2C port expander and the I2CKeyPad library.
Maybe look at some Arduino home automation using smartphone control...
That’s what I was planning on doing. However, I’ll have a motor shield on top of the arduino uno. Is it still safe to solder the keypad onto the uno? if so, how should I proceed?
The l293d motor shield goes on top of the uno, but is it okay to solder the keypad onto the uno first and then put the motor shield on?
I'd push those ICs on the shield fully into their sockets.
YMMV
nevermind I had more digital pins left on the side I used those and redefined them in the code. Works with a physical keypad and everything like I wanted.