Adafruit Motor/Stepper/Servo Shield

The Arduino / Freeduino SB is an excellent development platform, and part of its appeal is the use of shield boards. These plug onto the top of your Arduino / Freeduino SB, and make it really easy to add functionality.

This particular shield is the Adafruit Industries Motor / Stepper / Servo Shield. It has a very complete feature set, supporting servos, DC motors and stepper motors. Here are the full details:

• Supports two 5V hobby servos with jitterless high-resolution dedicated timer
• 4 H-bridges housed in a pair of well-proven L293D motor driver ICs
• 600mA per H-bridge
• 4.5 to 36VDC motor supply voltage supported
• Run up to 4 motors, bi-directionally! (Backwards and forwards)
• 8-bit, 256-levels of DC motor speed control
• Run up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar). Supports single/double coil & interleaved stepping
• Pull-down resistors for motor logic inputs (keeps it from turning on during power-up)
• Terminal block connectors for beefy 10-11AWG wire to motors and external power
• Reset button (which is usually a problem for shields that cover the reset button)
• Prebuilt Arduino software libraries ready to use!
• External power connections are separated logic and motor power.
• Arduino pins 14 through 20 are fully available (all analog input pins).
  • Digital pin 11: DC #1 / Stepper #1
  • Digital pin 3: DC #2 / Stepper #1
  • Digital pin 5: DC #3 / Stepper #2
  • Digital pin 6: DC #4 / Stepper #2
  • Digital pin 4, 7, 8 & 12 used to drive DC/Steppers via latch
  • Digital pin 9: Servo #1 control
  • Digital pin 10: Servo #2 control

It's really the most convenient way to drive motors with an Arduino / Freeduino SB