Question before buyng

Hello guys, today i decided to enter the Arduino owner club, and decided to buy Arduino Duemilanove.
All ok with that, but with it i do want to buy some Motor Shield, i need it to be able to rotate 2-3 motors and a Servo. (Foraward and backwards for motors)
So could you guys suggest me which one should i get? (Cause i wasted all the day today finding diffrances between them)

P.S: Also a quick question, what should i get for the Arduino so it can accept RC signals?

Best regards - KeNNy :slight_smile:

Regarding a shield for motors (DC, I presume from your description) and r/c servos:

While I haven't looked lately, last time I looked for any kind of controller (I didn't care if it were a shield or not) that supported both servos and an h-bridge (for DC motor control), I didn't have any success.

With that said, it might be better if you just built something yourself; you would learn a lot, and it would be cheaper (depending on the size of the DC motors you expect to control).

For example, if you were working with fairly small DC motors, you could get by with using an L298 to drive each DC motor. The servos would be hooked up to the Arduino's pins somewhat "directly", and could be controlled with the servo library, while other pins would be used to control the L298s and their attached DC motors.

An L298 can be had fairly cheap (even brand new); even with the extra supporting parts (resistors, etc), it will certainly be much cheaper than a shield (which for controlling both DC motors and servos, probably doesn't exist).

Your only other option, if you insist on going with a shield, is to find a DC motor controller sized for the number and current pull of the motors you will be using. As long as it has the ability to extend the headers (for stacking other shields on top, for instance), then you can tap into those to control your servos with the servo library. It would save you the step of having to procure and learn about how to hook up your own h-bridge for each DC motor you want to control (at the cost of extra expense for the shield, as well as the lost learning opportunity on how to build your own).

Good luck.

:slight_smile:

Thank you for the reply, i have looked, and found this one Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield for Arduino kit [v1.2] : ID 81 : $19.50 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits along with other 2-3, acording to the specs, it can power 4x motors and 2x servos at once, but since i found few others i wanted to know what would you suggest.

I have heard good things about the Adafruit motor shield, but I don't own it myself.

Actually, that doesn't look like too bad of a shield, if it meets your needs. I also notice that they brought out the the analog inputs to three-hole headers, which you might be able to populate so that you could hook up sensors or even more servos (if you didn't need to use the analog pins for sensors). The price isn't that bad, either.