Pololu motor driver DualVNH5019MotorShield error

Hello everybody,

I have attached the Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield to my board, that is full compatible with Arduino Mega 2560, as shown on the user guide. I wanted to power the Polulu 70:1 Metal Gearmotor 37Dx70L mm with 64 CPR Encoder. Shield and arduino are powered together using the Lipo 14,8 V battery.
After I attached one motor with the shield and started the Demo programm, i got the error (“M2 fualt”) in serial monitor. If I disable the stopIfFault() the serial monitor just says the current on M1 is 0.
If I attached the second motor, I also got the error (“M2 fualt”).
Could you please help me and say what i do wrong?

Hello.

Can you post pictures showing how everything is connected in your setup and close-up pictures showing the soldering on the Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield for Arduino board?

By the way, the recommend operating voltage for the Arduino Mega is 7V to 12V (the maximum limit is 20V), and keep in mind that a fully charged LiPo cell’s voltage can be as high as 4.2V. So, while the nominal voltage for a 4S LiPo is 14.8V, when fully charged, the voltage will be even higher than that (16.8V).

- Amanda

Hello Amanda,

thank you very much for your answer. I suppose I know what I am doing wrong. I wanted to use this shield plugging into Arduino board. As you can see it on the pictures. I also wanted to use the Arduino library (Modified VNH5019 shield library for 20kHz PWM with Mega ) for this shield. By now it is the standard library by Arduino. Yesterday I noticed that the pins don’t accord and I need to rework this shield, if I want to plug it.
Is there another library that I can use without reworking the motor driver shield?

Hello, Maria.

Can you test the shield using the unmodified example program from our Dual VNH5019 Motor Driver Shield library to see if the shield is working? It should work with the Arduino Mega 2560, but it will use analogWrite() to generate the PWM signals so they will be at a lower frequency.

If that doesn’t work, can you touch up your soldering and try again, (some of those solder joints look like they might not be whetted properly)?

You might take a look at the “Adafruit Guide To Excellent Soldering” for some tips for fixing common problems.

-Derrill

Hello, Derrill,

thank you for your advice. The shield works with the unmodified example.

Maria