The Adafruit Motor Shield v2: My Experiences and Impressions

When I was starting the ChickN ProwlR, which is a robot with a goal to stop our chickens from laying eggs on the ground, I was looking into motor shields. My IA teacher and I tested my 12v motors for amperage, and with a quick glance at the Adafruit Motor Shield we thought it would do the job but we were surprised.

When I looked at the Adafruit Motor Shield its spec sheet suggested a pretty good motor driver with an easy to use stackable design that could stack up to most as much motors as you could ever possibly think of using.

When I finally got to the stage of testing the motors I found to my surprise that the Adafruit Motor Shield couldn’t handle my motors. Granted I was an idiot and had four motors on it completely forgetting the 3 amp peak😬. But, the motor Shield still was alive in the end.

So, I bought another one and I was kinda thinking that I might need more than that but I didn’t want to be spending $25 on a motor Shield. Then the inevitable happened. The 4 motors were still pulling to many amps off of the shields and weren’t working.

By then I was getting a little worried but I was still optimistic when I looked at the spec sheet. It stated that the Shield could supple up to 1.2 amps per channel with a three amp peak across the 4 channels. My motors drew a max current of 1.2 amps per motor and I thought that the Shield could probably even survive a little more than that but I was slightly doubtful due to the previous experience. But I bought 2 more shields.

So, I stacked the shields together and tried to run some motors. Then my heart sank, and I saw money swirling down the drain. The motors would run for a couple minutes and then start to slow, slow, and slow some more until the finally staked and the power led on the shields was really dim.

Then I decided to do some in depth digging into the Adafruit Motor Shield and what I found stopped me in my tracks. Many forums were saying that the Shield couldn’t handle even close to 1.2 amps over a long period of time and that it can only achieve 1.2 amps for a very short period of time . I WAS PISSED! I had spent a little over $100 dollars on a practically useless motor Shield. It just goes to show that you should do your in depth research ahead of time.