What do you do when you run out of grounds to plug into on an Ardunio? After several sensors, servos, speed controllers, etc. you quickly run out of plug in grounds. I don't really want to run a sensor shield and lose the ability to have the ethernet shield sit on top. I don't want to start stripping ground wires on servos or sensor cables to hook them all together. Any suggestions for expanding the number of common grounds in a neat and expandable manner?
I have used an Arduino Mega 2560 with a W5100 ethernet shield next and a version 5 Uno sensor shield on top. You end up with many VCC and GND connections.
Thanks
Any suggestions for expanding the number of common grounds in a neat and expandable manner?
I took a 16 pin DIP socket and soldered a bare wire down each side row of pins. The other end or the wire was stuck in the 5v and ground pin sockets on the arduino, giving eight 5v/gnd pairs to use.
There are a number of ways to make a power bus. The last post is one of them. Most people use a small breadbord.
You can also get a small screw terminal strip (the kind that takes bare wires instead of ring terminals and use half for +5v and the other half for GND.
with a bit of soldier and black tape I spliced a cable with one male soldered to 4 or five females.
Lots of good ideas. I'm using a breadboard right now, but that is only for prototyping as far as I am concerned. Plus it it taking up a lot of real estate on the deck of my robot. I have some dip sockets. I might try that for now.
Thanks for all the ideas.
When you get past the prototype stage you will probably want soldered connections rather than plug-in connections so the problem will go away.
...R