How to test a female pin

[srgalli]

I am using an Arduino with a PING sensor connected to digital 7. I am using 2 shields with long female connectors on them and the 7 pin on one of the females isn't working. Is there anything that causes this frequently or that I can do. The other female rails work fine. Thanks.

[SmAsH]

So you want to know about a method to test the pin? It should always work...

[srgalli]

when I plug the sensor directly into the arduino it works, and when I plug it into the protoshield it works. When I plug the jumper wire into pin 7 that passes through the motorshield, it doesn't register an input through the serial port display. I am assuming that this means that the pin is broken somewhere up in the motorshield long female connector. Is there any tricks to cleaning the connections or finagling the pins or something? I apologize for sounding like such a noob but I didn't expect to run into such a simple problem.

[awally88]

Get a multimeter and test everything to see where it breaks, use the diode conenction setting if it has one, it will beep if its connected or nothing if its not.

[chelmi]

when I plug the sensor directly into the arduino it works, and when I plug it into the protoshield it works. When I plug the jumper wire into pin 7 that passes through the motorshield, it doesn't register an input through the serial port display. I am assuming that this means that the pin is broken somewhere up in the motorshield long female connector. Is there any tricks to cleaning the connections or finagling the pins or something? I apologize for sounding like such a noob but I didn't expect to run into such a simple problem.

Are you sure pin 7 is not used by the motor shield ?

[srgalli]

Sir, you are absolutely right. 4, 7, 8 and 12 are for stepper motor connections, and 09 and 10 are for servos. However, I am not even concerned with the motorshield at this point as I am only testing the PING so far. I don't quite understand why the pin should matter if I am not really interfacing with the motorshield yet, I am only passing through it via the extra long female headers down to the arduino. I will switch to an unused dig pin later tonight but I'd like to understand the reasoning behind this if anyone has any explanation.

Thanks for time and consideration.

[chelmi]

Sir, you are absolutely right. 4, 7, 8 and 12 are for stepper motor connections, and 09 and 10 are for servos. However, I am not even concerned with the motorshield at this point as I am only testing the PING so far. I don't quite understand why the pin should matter if I am not really interfacing with the motorshield yet, I am only passing through it via the extra long female headers down to the arduino. I will switch to an unused dig pin later tonight but I'd like to understand the reasoning behind this if anyone has any explanation.

Thanks for time and consideration.

The code is the same? could you paste it here?

[hopslink]

Sir, you are absolutely right. 4, 7, 8 and 12 are for stepper motor connections, and 09 and 10 are for servos. However, I am not even concerned with the motorshield at this point as I am only testing the PING so far. I don't quite understand why the pin should matter if I am not really interfacing with the motorshield yet, I am only passing through it via the extra long female headers down to the arduino. I will switch to an unused dig pin later tonight but I'd like to understand the reasoning behind this if anyone has any explanation.

Thanks for time and consideration.

If the pin is being used as a stepper drive output then it is probably designed not connect to the Arduino as a pass through. If it did connect you would run the risk of contention issues if the stepper drive output is at logic levels, or if there is a power driver for the motor on the shield you would be trying to sink/source motor drive currents through a microcontroller pin Do you have the schematics for the shield?

[srgalli]

Apparently according to a tutorial website for the shield, digital pin 2 is the only truly unused pin. So I set the signal for the PING to pin 2. This works, but when I plug in servos to the shield, no go. Anyone know about this? There was a recent post with a similar question but based on battery power vs. USB power if I recall.

[hopslink]

This >CLICKY< may be the post you refer to. You may well be seeing the same problem, however this is just a guess. Without more information about your setup guessing is all people can do It is always helpful if you can provide as much information about your setup as possible, see >HERE< 

If possible instead of testing the whole system try to break it into separate subsystems and test these individually. When you know these work start to combine subsystems, testing as you go.

Splitting your system into controller, sensor, servos, servo driver and serial display you already have the controller, sensor and display working together, and the addition of the servos and/or driver is causing problems. So start to test accordingly:
 - Can the controller and driver shield drive the servos (ignoring the sensor and display)? Above you say "no go". Do you mean that nothing works? or just the sensor read/serial output?