Datasheet

Stacking Shields

One of the cool things about this shield design is that it is possible to stack shields. Every shield you stack can control

another 2 steppers or 4 DC motors (or a mix of the two)

You can stack up to 32 shields for a total of 64 steppers or 128 DC motors! Most people will probably just stack two or

maybe three but hey, you never know. (PS if you drive 64 steppers from one of these shields send us a photo, OK?)

Note that stacking shields does not increase the servo connections - those are hard-wired to the Arduino digital 9 & 10

pins. If you need to control a lot of servos, you can use our 16-channel servo shield and stack it with this shield to add a

crazy large # of servos.

Stacking shields is very easy. Each shield you want to stack on top of must have stacking headers installed. Check our

instructions for how to do so. The top shield does not have to have stacking headers unless you eventually want to put

something on top of it.

The only thing to watch for when stacking shields is every shield must have a unique I2C address. The default address

is 0x60. You can adjust the address of the shields to range from 0x60 to 0x7F for a total of 32 unique addresses.

Addressing the Shields

Each board in the chain must be assigned a unique address. This is done with the address jumpers on the lower edge

of the board. The I2C base address for each board is 0x60. The binary address that you program with the address

jumpers is added to the base I2C address.

To program the address offset, use a drop of solder to bridge the corresponding address jumper for each binary '1' in

the address.

The right-most jumper is address bit #0, then to the left of that is address bit #1, etc up to address bit #4