Arduino Microcontroller with Motor Shield
The Arduino Duemilanove Microcontroller board (Figure 1) was used for the controller in this project. It was chosen because it can be loaded with code written in C, which we were most familiar with. It also has useful information to quickly connect to digital and analog input and output ports. Information researched to learn how to use the Arduino Duemilanove an interface with the input and output pins was found here. The Motor Shield from Adafruit (Figure 2) was mounted onto the Arduino Microcontroller, which enables an interface to drive stepper and DC motors. Information researched to learn how to interface to motors was found here. Figure 3 shows the switches soldered onto a prototype board used as digital inputs to the software to run it in various modes.