External power to motor shield

Projects Programming
1

Hey, I have a motor shield by Adafruit () pictured here which I will use to drive two DC motors. I want to split the power between the arduino and the motor shield. So I will use a external 4xAA battery pack. I have a few questions.

  1. What is the external power screw terminal used for in the picture above?
  2. I put the black wire to the GND in the middle of the screw terminal between the first and second motor. Does this mean I put the red wire where 5v is in the motor shield and solder it?
2

This might help:

There are two places you can get your motor 'high voltage supply' from. One is the DC jack on the Arduino board and the other is the 2-terminal block on the shield that is labeled EXT_PWR. The DC Jack on the Arduino has a protection diode so you won't be able to mess things up too bad if you plug in the wrong kind of power. However the EXT_PWR terminals on the shield do not have a protection diode (for a fairly good reason). Be utterly careful not to plug it in backwards or you will destroy the motor shield and/or your Arduino!

3

When you use a seperate power, use the "POWER" connector for the AA batteries and remove the jumper.

When you want to be able to reverse the rotation of the motors, connect the first motor to M1_A en M1_B, the second motor to M2_A en M2_B, and so on. That is how a normal H-Bridge is connected. In that case, the GND in the middle is not used.

4

See diagram:

mshielddiag.png
mshielddiag.png657×722 69.7 KB