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The original Adafruit Motorshield kit is one of our most beloved kits, which is why we decided to make something even better. We have upgraded the shield kit to make the bestest, easiest way to drive DC and Stepper motors. This shield will make quick work of your next robotics project! We kept the ability to drive up to 4 DC motors or 2 stepper motors, but added many improvements: Instead of a L293D darlington driver, we now have the TB6612 MOSFET driver: with 1.2A per channel and 3A peak current capability. It also has much lower voltage drops across the motor so you get more torque out of your batteries, and there are built-in flyback diodes as well. Instead of using a latch and the Arduino's PWM pins, we have a fully-dedicated PWM driver chip onboard. This chip handles all the motor and speed controls over I2C. Only two pins (SDA & SCL) are required to drive the multiple motors, and since it's I2C you can also connect any other I2C devices or shields to the same pins. This also makes it drop-in compatible with any Arduino, such as the Uno, Leonardo and Mega R3. (Due's Wire support is still in beta, but once that works well we can test it on the Due) Completely stackable design: 5 address-select pins means up to 32 stackable shields: that's 64 steppers or 128 DC motors!

• 2 connections for 5V 'hobby' servos connected to the Arduino's high-resolution dedicated timer - no jitter! Can run motors on 4.5VDC to 13.5VDC.
• 4 H-Bridges: TB6612 chipset provides 1.2A per bridge (3A peak) with thermal shutdown protection, internal kickback protection diodes.
• Up to 4 bi-directional DC motors with individual 8-bit speed selection (so, about 0.5% resolution)
• Up to 2 stepper motors (unipolar or bipolar) with single coil, double coil, interleaved or micro-stepping.
• Motors automatically disabled on power-up
• Big terminal block connectors to easily hook up wires (18-26AWG) and power
• Arduino reset button brought up top
• Polarity protected 2-pin terminal block and jumper to connect external power, for separate logic
• Tested compatible with Arduino UNO, Leonardo, ADK
• Download the easy-to-use Arduino software library, check out the examples and you're ready to go!