The motor shield arrived as a PCB, 3 ICs, and a handful of passive components, meaning it was time to break out the soldering iron. The kit assembled without too much trouble, with full assembly instructions online. The online instructions appear to be for an earlier edition of the board, but it wasn't too hard to decipher the differences.
The only part of the directions that were unclear was a statement that "the four 'middle' pins of the L293D motor driver chips are tied to a large heat sink and thus may end up getting 'bridged' with solder as shown in the second image." I wasn't sure if that meant you were supposed to bridge the pins, or it was just something that just may happen. A little digging on the forums revealed that the pins in question are all GND, so it doesn't really matter whether they get bridged or not.
BEFORE
AFTER
I thought about showing you the outstanding soldering job on the back of the board, but decided instead to blame the camera for taking a poor picture, which has no relation to the high-quality soldering which actually occurred on this assembly. I also installed a set of stacking headers in the extra provided through-holes, and cut them short on the back as they will not be used for stacking; since I've never worked with motors before, I'm guessing I'll have need of the convenient headers for debugging.
Next up will be the connection of the stepper motors and a sample sketch to get them moving, after of course reading the manual.
No comments:
Post a Comment