Freetronics Forum

Yes you can.

The 5 volt rail is common to the entire circuit, so if you apply power to that rail, you can power the microcontroller.

Ah yea, i get what you mean, you want a kind of I2C set and forget controller.
Stackable like the freetronic RGB modules, or the temperature modules.

Posted this in the wrong damn thread...

http://www.lightobject.com/240128-LCD-D ... -P150.aspx

One of these look pretty, i have two coming to see how easy they are to program.

There is already some motor shield product on the way, jaycar will have them in fairly soon.

ban anything from russia and somalia by the look of it so far! haha

At the moment im working on a very basic easy to implement menu system using the freetronics shield.

Nothing complicated, its just to give people some easy way to make on the fly changes to their variables while in program.

Using these beauties!

http://www.lightobject.com/240128-LCD-D ... -P150.aspx

A bit of an inbetween the 16x2 lcd shield, and the upcoming oled shield.

Sorry for the late reply, this is in the wrong forum section, thats why.

Do you have a multimeter? It sounds like you are missing an earth somewhere thats applying bias to the transistors and turning the relays on.

Welcome!
Whats your interests? Coding? electronics?
What kind of projects are you wanting to make with microcontrollers.

Also check if your antivirus software isnt doing something with USB connections.
Other things to check for are:
Third party USB optimisation software.
Policies regarding USB devices on a domain machine.
AMD Filter drives.
Intel OHCI usb3 drivers.
USB3/USB2 ports.
Front USB vs rear USB ports.