Is nothing ever easy? Adventure #3 involves rotating a servo motor back and forth 180
°. Since all of my servo motors have a 3-hole female connector on the end, I didn't have bare wires available to connect it directly to my Arduino UNO. So instead of cutting the connector off the end of my motor, I decided to use one of the shields I've accumulated from different vendors. A
shield is a board that can be plugged on top of the Arduino printed circuit board (PCB) extending its capability. Actually, I don't know that shields "extend" the capability as much as just make it easier to do something. In this case, I decided to use Pitsco's new shield, because it has 6 male connectors for servo motors, plus an additional connector for a battery pack, mounted right on top - no messing around with breadboards this time. All I had to do was plug in my motor and battery pack and I was ready to go. Right??...wrong!
Unfortunately, I discovered that the Pitsco shield was a bit bigger than my Arduino UNO - there were 4 extra pins sticking down with no holes available to fit them in. I had been told that this shield was totally compatible with the UNO, but it definitely wasn't. Luckily, I had SparkFun's Arduino Redboard - an UNO look-alike, which fit the Pitsco shield perfectly. Upon doing some Google research, I discovered that I have an UNO original, which indeed is 4 pins shorter (2 each side) than the current Arduino UNO and SparkFun Redboard. The new UNO uses a different microchip which allows for faster transfer rates and more memory (always a nice improvement). The pin layout is identical between the two models, so I can still use my UNO when I'm breadboarding projects, but if I want to use a shield, I'll need to stick with the Redboard.
