Our First Robot - Build Broken

Well, I don't know what happened.  I rewired up the Robot to get that snarl of wires out of the way and now the motors don't work with the motor shield and the servo used with the Ping sensor jitters.

Here are things I've tried:

I've tried rewiring the motors to the breadboard a few different ways to no avail because I thought it was the poor soldering job I did on the wires and the wires I made were not seated in the breadboard properly.  I made new solid core wires with no effect.

If I put power and ground from the breadboard to the motors, they work fine.

Oh well, I'm sure I'll be pondering this for a few hours.

Maus

 


 

25 Jan 2012

I have removed the shields and hooked up the wires directly to 5v power.

SheildProb_Initial.jpg

Here's the power output:

ShieldProb_Power.jpg

Each motor output should be 4.99v according to my multimeter.  Here are my results:

ShieldProb_Mot1.jpg

ShieldProb_Mot2.jpg

Next step is take the motor drivers out and hook them up individually to see if the chips are blown.

Datasheet: www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/sn754410.pdf

Testing the HBridge

Here's my testing rig.  I have power and ground to the appropriate pins and move my green wire to the output I want to test.

ShieldProb_TestHB.jpg

Everything checks out okay and I didn't blow up the chip!


26 Jan 2012

With help from the people in the shout box, I have the shield wired up to a breadboard and working fine.  The next step is putting it back on the Arduino and getting the motors running again on the platform.

My thanks to:

  • birdmun
  • mogul
  • ChuckCrunch

Maybe now we can get to something I know about, programming!

Maus

You have checked the motors

Next, back up the line and hook the motors the the shield and feed 5v to one of the inputs and the enable for that motor, ground the other pin, and see if the motor spins. If not, then I would guess the shield is your problem and you would need to check that the motor driver is getting power and it is not popped. If that doesn’t work then you will need to make sure you haven’t harmed the ouputs from your arduino.

Just my 2 cents.