Noise From Motors

Community General Discussions
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Hi Guys,

Some of you may remember that I was having a difficult time getting an Arduino Motor Shield to run my 4 wheel motors on my robot Herbert. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work right so I finally decided to try a different route. I bought two qik2s9v motor controllers from Pololu...one board for the front motors and one board for the back motors.

Here's the sucky thing...I'm having the same weird problems I was having with the motor shield...sometimes they work, sometimes they don't...sometimes they work for a second and stop....just weird, whimpy stuff....so this got me to wondering...

Could these be really noisy motors I have and could that make them interefere with the logic on the Arduino? Has anyone experienced anything like that? I'm pretty sure I read somewhere else that electrical noise can cause problems...if so, what's the solution?

 

As an FYI, I have the Arduino running off a 5 V Minty Boost, the motor controller board running of the 5 volt out on the Arduino and the motors have their own power supply....I'm pretty positive it is not a battery issue...

 

Thanks,

 

Annie :)

2

Do your motor have the noise
Do your motor have the noise suppression caps installed as per the Pololu user’s guide? The relevant section is here if you wanna check it out.

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Wow, thanks Telefox…I

Wow, thanks Telefox…I thought I’d read everything, but apparently not! I’ll try the caps and see what happens!

 

Annie

4

separate power supplies right?

And if so: common ground right?

At any rate: if noise suppressionn does not fix your problem, try isolating transient power dips. That means, try different power supplies for either the logic or the motors, or both.