Debugging a RadioShack Arduino motor/sensor shield I bought a cheap "Make" kit at RadioShack, which includes some sort of proprietary Arduino Uno compatible motor/sensor shield. Naturally, the documentation is pretty bad. The documentation and Arduino code for the kit is here:

https://github.com/RadioShackCorp/2770168-MakeItRobotics-Starter-Kit

It includes a circuit schematic (2770168-CorePCB_schematic.pdf), but I'm still having trouble mapping the pins to the Arduino's pins. Can anyone help me make sense of this?

What I've made out so far is the shield's screw terminals appear to be connected to quadruple h-bridges. However, there are several other pin headers that I can't quite make out. I think it also directly exposes 4 of the Uno's ADC pins and 4 DIO pins. There are four pins for dual IR line sensors, but there's a lot of circuitry between these and any Arduino pins. Almost everything feeds into a DC6688F2SCN chip, but I can't find a datasheet anywhere, so I have no idea what it does.

The manual says jumpers on J16 need to be removed in order to connect to the Uno over USB, so it looks like I can't use the shield with the board and debug via USB at the same time. Is this board worth investigating or should I trash it?
There is a bit of info on the DC6688F2SCN here: Chip Selection Guide, but Chris is 100%. Without the firmware, all you can do is look at the source code for the Arduino side.

If you look closely at the top of the board, you can see that one side of J16 goes to pins 2 &amp; 3 and the other to 0 &amp; 1. On the schematic, there are some other components hooked in there as well. The serial is definitely going using 0 &amp; 1. I'm not sure why they have them wired to 2 &amp; 3. It's probably a good idea not to put anything on any of these four pins.

That's pretty good though. Compare it to the SainSmart L293D shield, which is significantly cheaper but eats up eight digital pins when driving four motors. Also, the L293Ds can only put out 600 mA per channel while the Bs can do a full Amp.

The documentation isn't very good and the supporting code also has some issues; but, overall, this is a pretty decent package. It comes with the erector set pieces as well. You also get three IR sensor channels.