I'm new to using arduinos so i have a couple questions for my final project for school. I have a remote control boat that i'm trying to control through my phone or tablet. I have seen some things online with an arduino and a HC-06 Bluetooth module but i want to do it with 2 arduino 101s.
My first question is what motor shield is compatible with the arduino 101? I have a motor shield V1.0 and it isn't working so I think it might need a V2.
I want to use the Bluetooth RC controller app on my phone or tablet to send the commands to the first arduino(master) then send commands to the arduino(slave) in the boat. Is this even possible with the arduino 101? If not, is there another way i can accomplish this?
I have a V2.0 Seed Studio Motor Shield and that does not work with the 101; it's fine with an Uno though. I'm thinking that the 3.3v on the 101's GPIO pins might pose an issue with the standard Arduino shields. However, I just picked up an OSEPP MTD-01 Motor Driver from Fry's and it works like champ. I just add a secondary power source to power the Motor Driver and Servos and it seems to be fine. It has a L298 dual H bridge driver on the board, so the other option might be to get a Proto board and build your own Motor Shield that works with the 101.
Hi,
the motor shield v1 doesn't use IOREF pin so it "should" works but it's out of specs. V2 is much better for newer boards. Remember that you need at least a 9V power supply to drive high current loads (or you can power the board via USB after shorting the "USB 1.5A SHORT" near the USB connector)
300ft (almost 100 meters) is quite the limit in open space environment for the 101 BLE chip and antenna
No problem in controlling the 101 via a smartphone app (just make sure that the app has support for Bluetooth Low Energy and not only for BT). Instead, the 101 cannot act as a BLE master, so the communication between the two Arduinos can only be performed via UART (pins 0-1)
I just tested both examples provided with the driver libraries with a single, continous rotation servo and both compile and run without any code changes.
This may be an option for those needing a simple way to get up and running servos and PMW applications with the 101.
I looked at the libraries and they appear to do everything through the I2C interface in a microcontroller neutral/generic fashion, good news for us!
I had my eye on the Adafruit TB6612 1.2A DC/Stepper Motor Driver Breakout Board which I believe uses the same TB6612 as their motor shields. However, the issue I have seen is when you start adding more than 1 servo to the mix. It would be interesting to see the performance of the 101 with the 16-channel shield as the number of devices increase. I would imagine you would have to run it a 9v as facchinm mentioned. That is unless you use a secondary power source.
Good point,that is why I specified 1 servo in the post, any change from what is specified sometimes will cause things to fail.
The board separates out the the power supply to the motors and to the driver chip. The servo motor terminal states a 6V max and we have a battery pack hooked up to this. So I am not sure 9V to the motors is an option. We are powering the 101 & motor shield itself from the USB.
The tutorial lays out suggestions for adding a capacitor to the shield for large servo numbers, is this also in the stepper shield tutorial?
Our project will probably have 6 - 8 servos max, so as we progress I will update here.
Has anyone successfully used the Pololu Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield with Arduino 101? I can't seem to make it work. I have external 14.8V (4x3.7 Lithium cells) powering the VIN of the VNH. The shield has the option to directly power the Arduino although I'm not sure how clean the supply is and if it will interfere with the BLE controls.
Thanks for the words of caution on the input power. I noticed the 12V recommended but theres s 20V moax so I hope the 14.8 coming form the lithium should be OK. Since these are being used for the motors I may add some small caps to keep the noise from leaking back into the Arduino.
