I want to use Arduino Mega on a wireless robot application. Here I want to control 8 Motors with 4 dual motor drivers (probably MC33887 or 33926) But I had some problems here like I cannot afford enough Power Outputs or ground connections from Arduino. So is there a practical solution where I can take all power or ground connections to a place. I thought using a breadboard might be useful, but it will make the connections very bad and it will take alot of space.
On my last project I made a "bus" card on PCB and tried to make the connections there, but in the end i've got a complex card. So can you suggest me a practical solution for ground or power connections I can use on such a wireless robot project.
Yes, sorry after reading my post again, I guess I described it wrong.
I meant on my last project I used Arduino Duemilanove, 3 MC33887 drivers, one light sensor (LDR), one potentiometer and one ISD1760 sound record circuit. There were other additional elements aswell.
In the end I needed alot of diferent 5 V and 12 V power input, therefore I have made a 7805 voltage regulator circuit. I checked sparkfun and I saw they are selling a board for changing the power input. Additionally I needed a place where I can make place for common ground connections.
Consequently I tried to connect all of these items on a card I built, but it looked very complex and had some problems. So is there a practical solution for distrubuting the power connection and making a common ground for the circuit (for example here i needed like 4-5 5V power input and a lot of ground connection)
I'll try to put the pictures but they are not on this computer at the moment. I'll put it later. Thanks for the help
Most of the time, when I have a project that requires a small amount of glue logic, I put it on a proto PCB like this or this. They have power and ground busses that make it easy to tie everything together.
Since this project has a lot of motors, you may need heavier ground and power lines to handle the extra current. Perhaps something like a terminal strip for your central connection, with wires going directly from the ground and motor supply pins of the motor driver chips to make sure you don't try to push too many electrons through those skinny PCB traces.
Since both of those links are to kits, rather than completed shields, you could get just the XBee shield, and the pass-through headers that the protoshield is sold with (they are sold separately).
Using both of those shields together will be difficult, because the protoshield needs to be on top in order to allow connecting stuff to it, and the XBee shield needs to be on top because of the antenna on the XBee that mounts on the XBee shield.
Replacing the headers on the XBee shield solves the problem of who's on top.
The XBee doesn't need a whole lot of connections to the Arduino. So you could use something like Sparkfun's "Explorer" board, and wire it to the prototyping shield. That would solve the clearance problem.