Balancing Bot Arduino Shield Stack

I am slowly working toward the balancing robot Arduino shield stack.  So far, I have tested the XBee shield by sending information from the Arduino to the XBee and to my computer across the room.  As you can see from the below images, I have soldered my SparkFun 2 axis gyro and 3 axis accelerometer (Link) to my ProtoShield and mounted that to the XBee Shield which is mounted on the Arduino UNO.  The addition of the gyro/accelerometer was simple since no other shield I plan on using utilizes the analog pins (in order to use a stack of shields successfully, two shields can not use the same analog or digital pin... logic power is fine).

Gyro on ProtoShield

Wireless Gyro Stack

Next, I plan on adding the motor shield, which I purchased through the MakerShed (Link), to complete my balancing bot stack.  I have tested this shield and it should work for what I need it to do.  The shield is capable of driving 4 bi-directional motors... however, since my robot has 2 'large' motors (6A stall) (Link), I plan on doing some 'hacking' to allow it to drive 2 motors with all of the 8 outputs (essentially spreading the power around so I don't overheat the chips).  I will also add an Aluminum heat sink, which may be custom made unless I can find my way over to my local electronics store.  If heat sinks are new to you, I will do some explaining in the next post (in a nutshell, they help pull the heat out of the thing it is connected to,  a motor driver chip in this case, and spread it over a larger area).

Balancing Bot Arduino Stack