Okay, I’m stuck.  I don’ t know what I’m doing wrong or what I need to do next.  So, I’m calling upon John Abella, Sandy Noble, and Kongorilla for your help.  :)

Here’s where I am:

• The burning!
• At last attempt, I hooked up some small steppers to the Adafruit motor shield, put the shield on my Arduino Uno, hooked up the USB cable and the 9v power adapter.
• I heard a small pop and smelled warm electronics.1
• After the burning
• I can upload and run the Arduino basic blink sketch.  I can alter this to change the blinking pattern.
• I can upload and run the Arduino sketches to operate a microservo.  I can alter this to change the microservo’s behavior.
• I can upload the Adafruit sketches for steppers – but I can’t make the steppers move.
• I can upload the Polargraph sketch – but I can’t make the steppers do anything.
• I am connecting the steppers to the shield according to the instructions on the Adafruit page: “To connect to our shield, put the wires in this order: Red, Yellow, skip ground, Green, Brown“
• When I connect the 9v power to the Arduino, all it does is make the two chips on the Adafruit motor shield very warm.

Now, I’ve got tons of questions for you:

1. Did I ruin my Arduino?  I can still run the blink and microservo sketches.
2. Did I ruin my motor shield?  How can I tell if it is operational?  When I connect the power to the Arduino and have the little jumper in place, the green LED is lit up.
3. What am I doing wrong?
4. What should I try next?
5. How should I diagnose a problem?

1. Now I’ve got a cold and couldn’t smell anything if I wanted [↩]