Hey! New to the forum, thanks for all the help!
Building a hobby robot (on Mini DFRobotShop Rover Kit chassis that comes with motor, battery and shield based on L298). All fine and dandy, except the connection to Arduino is done by stacking on top of the arduino by connecting all the pins, and it uses/blocks the Serial ports for some Xbee interfaces (that I don't think I need, I don't even know what they are). But I will need the serial port for RPi integration. And it wants to power the arduino as well.
So two problems. I don't want to serials to be blocked by Xbee AND i want to supply my own power to arduino.
So, my question is can I just add the connections from arduino to pins to the same new motor shield pins I use (pin 5 &6 for E1 & E2 speed control, pins 7 & 8: M1 & M2 direction control), not connect the other pins(Xbee, Vin, 5V, 3V3 etc), add the battery to the motor shield to supply the power only to the motors by connecting the GRD between arduino & motor shield?
What I'm not sure of is apparently the motor shield supplies power to arduino as well, not sure through what pins, so if I only connect the 4 digital motor control pins -> arduino and the ground it should not power arduino (planning to power arduino in a different way)? From what I have understood, if you want to use different voltages on the same circuit to power the motors they should be connected by GRN.
Also to not block the serials can I just skip connecting the Xbee Tx pin / Rx pins to arduino?
User guide for the shield and the schematics https://www.robotshop.com/media/files/pdf/dfrobotshop-rover-shield-user-guide.pdf
https://www.robotshop.com/media/files/pdf/dfrobotshop-rover-shild-schematic.pdf
Thanks in advance!
