Circuit Diagram
Circuit Diagram and Design Decisions
Motor Shield and Battery
Our motor shield and battery choices were strongly influenced by the motors we purchased, which you can read about in Mechanical Design. Our motors required 12V to run at full speed and a rated current of 1.4A.
Batteries
We chose to use drone batteries which have an 11.1V output. While this is lower than the max voltage of our motors, we found that this voltage would still be enough to power our motors and we were not too concerned with the slight drop in max speed which would result from running at a lower voltage.
Motor Shield
Since our motors had a running current of 1.32A, we were looking for a motor controller that had a running current at that or slightly higher so we would not burn out the board with our current draw. We settled on using the Adafruit Motor Shield V2, despite it having a 1.2A output, as we had it on hand and were not planning on running our motors at full voltage.
