Datasheet

Overview

The original Adafruit Motorshield kit is one of our most beloved kits, which is why we decided to make something even

better. We have upgraded the shield kit to make the bestest, easiest way to drive DC and Stepper motors. This shield

will make quick work of your next robotics project! We kept the ability to drive up to 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors,

but added many improvements:

Instead of a L293D darlington driver, we now have the TB6612 MOSFET drivers with 1.2A per channel current

capability (you can draw up to 3A peak for approx 20ms at a time). It also has much lower voltage drops across the

motor so you get more torque out of your batteries, and there are built-in flyback diodes as well.

Instead of using a latch and the Arduino's PWM pins, we have a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard. This chip

handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C. Only two GPIO pins (SDA & SCL) plus 5v and GND. are required to

drive the multiple motors, and since it's I2C you can also connect any other I2C devices or shields to the same pins.

This also makes it drop-in compatible with any Arduino, such as the Uno, Leonardo, Due and Mega R3.

Completely stackable design: 5 address-select pins means up to 32 stackable shields: that's 64 steppers or 128 DC

motors! What on earth could you do with that many steppers? I have no idea but if you come up with something send

us a photo because that would be a pretty glorious project.

Lots of other little improvements such as a polarity protection FET on the power pins and a big prototyping area. And

the shield is assembled and tested here at Adafruit so all you have to do is solder on straight or stacking headers and

the terminal blocks.

Lets check out these specs again:

2 connections for 5V 'hobby' servos connected to the Arduino's high-resolution dedicated timer - no jitter!