Adafruit Industries has a selection of products that are terribly cool. They don’t have a lot of products in comparison to other electronics distributers, but what they have is some cool stuff.
In particular is their Adafruit Motor Shield. The bad boy drives four DC motors and with PWM, as well as handling a pair of servos. It is also able to swap out driving four motors for driving two stepper motors. It’s a great little shield and so far I’ve bought and built 14 of them.
AF Mshield: built properly with sockets and headers
Of those, I had trouble with 6 of them. In each case of failure to function, it turned out that I’d apparently overheated a chip leg during the assembly soldering process. Once I caught on, I started using sockets with the motor shields I built and I haven’t had a start up failure since. All of them are in their robotic creatures and still raring to go. There was some discussion that using sockets here would be a bad idea. This was because the L293 dual H-bridge chips use the center two pins on each side as a heatsink in addition to being ground points. I’ve driven a pair of 1.5 amp motors and never warmed the surface even after constant use over ten or so minutes. The motors got hot but the chips didn’t. This speaks to the need not to worry about heat dissipation with sockets in the vast majority of places this shield might be used.
I think their forum based support could be better. Turning people over to a group forum for support dumps the help needy into a lot of different opinions that are in conflict. I found a number of folks willing to argue with the documentation from the companies that make the products, even Adafruit itself. In all it serves to be very confusing and not a reliable source of assistance. I think of it as a black mark when a company won’t support its own products. Because I have twice gotten no help at all from the forums for Adafruit, I look at them as a last resort. It does have a dampening effect on my appreciation for their stuff.
I wouldn’t call Adafruit an electronics or robotics company as much as I would a “coolness” distributor. Their product line, seen here, is limited but rife with the fundamentals of Geek nirvana. It’s no wonder I shop their products. While robotic components make up the majority of their fare,
TV B Gone: AF's universal tv shutoff
they’re supportive of a decent variety of ways to use them, robotics only a fraction. The clothing you see some people wear that light up with LEDs and do other electronic magic sorts of things are based in the little components that drive the little robots I make. Microcontrollers made for inclusion in a sewing project, thread that conducts electricity, and a whole menu of things to make work with them.
Their selling system –their checkout– is convenient and offers excellent feedback about the orders made. It also keeps a solid record available to the customer all the time via their account pages on the website. I like the Adafruit line but wish they had better support and more customer empathy; they should get solid support for their products and spend the extra pennies to make their kits a bit better. Using sockets for the ICs, for instance.
I have found a couple of their more useful and less whimsy based items cloned by Chinese manufacturers. This includes their USBtiny and Motor Shield. The clone products were cheaper, assembled, and functioned just fine. Found on eBay, the assembled motor shield was $15 to the Adafruit $20 for their kit. I asked Adafruit about the clones and they said that if I bought those that they wouldn’t be supported. Actually, they are as well supported as the Adafruit sold items because Adafruit makes the users support each other with little assistance from them, ergo the support is not product-centric. Normally I dislike clones, but in the open source and architecture world of the Arduino cloning is not only permitted, it’s encouraged.