What now? Struggling with motor controllers

Let's Make Robots
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1

Since my Arduino motor shield died for unknown reasons and the Mr. Basic controller still wasn't working, I was officially stuck. I posted a question in the forums, and Simon Z pointed to Polulu and gave me some extra info on controllers. After looking at Polulu's catalog, I saw that most of them were out of my budget and making a controller is out of the question because there are NO suppliers in my country. So now I'm stuck, again. I could buy parts on the internet, but the shipping is always a problem. For exaple, I was looking at the L298 motor controller from Solarbotics. It was around $19, which is ok, but the shipping was almost $60. What I would like to know is how to get out of this hole and resume my projects. I would really like to see Mr. Basic alive, again.

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In looking over previous

In looking over previous posts, it appears one driver failed on the Adafruit motor shield. I could not find the results of testing 1 pin at a time to check outputs. On the Dagu motor driver, seems like there was a suggestion of replacing a transistor with a TIP120 transistor. The "how" to get out of this hole is to test to see what part has failed, then go find a supplier for that part that ships cheaply to Puerto Rico.

Try some tests, post the results of those tests including how you tested.

Solarbotics is in Canada, so a source in the US might be cheaper to ship to Puerto Rico.