Quote Originally Posted by ecat View Post
Wise words indeed. Never underestimate the latent malice of electric motors.


Last bit, honest.
So you have your motors running off a battery supply and you have wired your arduino to run from the same batteries. Is it ok to plug in the USB connector, or one of those neat 6 pin breakout boards? The battery is supplying voltage and the USB connector wants to supply 5V so what happens when the two meet up? The answer is, I don't know. Perhaps it depends on the flavour of arduino, perhaps it doesn't matter, perhaps... On my 6 pin Mini Pro I just don't connect the 5V pin, in general I think it a good idea to always disconnect the arduino battery/external supply before using USB.
Thanks ecat, yes thats why I have all the baords powered, and I to dont know the effect of having power and pluging in the 5v USB, but I hope that once all the wireless stuff is up and running I can swap to total independant and use the wireless to program the board (as seen on youtube :) )

One of the things I want to attempt is to switch between two cameras using a relay, in theory it should be easy, but I bet it wont be.