Motor Shield - DC Motor

This entry focuses on using the Motor Shield with DC motors.

Adafruit MotorShield v2.3

The Adafruit MotorShield is a convenient way to control DC motors, Servos and Stepper motors.  Within a current limited capacity, one could run all three.

Upon purchase it is worth noting that you have to solder the stand off pins that connect the shield to the arduino.

After that, in the Arduino IDE, download the appropriate MotorShield library which has all the examples I'll reference for applications using this shield.

DC Motor Direct

Connecting a DC motor directly to the Arduino is pretty involved and requires a resister, diode, and a transistor.  In the grand scheme of things, it isn't that much, by comparison to the simplicity of using the Motor Shield, it's seemingly not really worth it, especially if you want to run more than one DC motor simultaneously.

A straight forward tutorial on how to do this can be found here: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-arduino-lesson-13-dc-motors/overview