Hi, I just purchased three of your “30:1 Metal Gearmotor 37Dx68L mm with 64 CPR Encoder”
(one held as a spare)
I need to connect two of them to an “Arduino Uno” and “Adafruit Motor Shield for Arduino v2.3” (adafruit.com/product/1438)
I spoke with “adafruit_support_bill” this morning and asked him “What is the proper arrangement of the six wires coming from the encoder?”
Bill responded: “The motor has 2 wires which connect to the motor shield. The other 4 wires are for the encoder. You will need to get guidance from Pololu on how best to hook those up to the Uno”.
So, here I am. I’ve been told great things by Bill about the quality of these motors!
Please tell me how best to wire them up to these two boards.
You can find a description of the wires used for the encoders under the “Using the Encoder” section of the product page for that motor. The motor power wires (red and black) will connect to the motor terminals on your motor shield. To power the sensors on the encoder, you will most likely want to connect the green GND wire on the encoder to GND on the Arduino and the blue Vcc wire to one of the 5V pins on the Arduino.
The yellow and white wires should connect to I/O pins on your Arduino, but you will need to decide the exact placement for your project since it depends on which pins you have available and how your code is structured. In general, the pins you select should not be used for anything else, and you will be able to get better performance if each encoder output is connected to an interrupt pin. You can look at the Rotary Encoders tutorial on the Arduino site for more information about this and some code examples.
