Here’s another adafruit product launched today: a prototyping shield that compensates for the Arduino’s stupid oddly spaced headers.
Related: The Seeeduino has an alternate row of headers with protoboard friendly spacing.
shield77 Articles
MEGAshield For Arduino MEGA
The folks over at NKC electronics didn’t waste any time with this one. They sent in the MEGA shield for the Arduino MEGA. We just posted the story of the Arduino MEGA yesterday, so that was pretty fast.
AVR HV Rescue Shield
While playing with an ATmega168, [Jeff] programmed the RSTDISBL fuse bit. This pretty much makes the chip useless in most cases. [Jeff] didn’t want to give up on it though, so he built a system to program it using the rarely used high voltage parallel programming mode. He used an Arduino, a few lines of code and a few spare parts to make it. After sharing the idea with some fellow programmers, he decided to make an Arduino shield specifically for this purpose. You can use this to reset almost any fuse to rescue a chip. If you are a die hard AVR person and never started using Arduino instead, the STK500 actually has this built in.
TinkerKit, Physical Computing Toolkit
TinkerKit is a collection of 20 different sensors and 10 actuators. It’s meant to make prototyping of physical computing devices much quicker/easier. The devices plug into a Sensor Hub Arduino shield. There is also a similar hub board that can emulate a keyboard; it translates sensor input directly to key strokes. It looks like a very ambitious project and it’s still in development. We love the idea though and think the wide variety of components will foster better final designs. The TinkerKit site covers the current component lineup and there’s a demo video embedded below.
Arduino Shield Scaffold
[Garrett] from macetech has been prototyping shields for the Arduino development platform. Arduino’s have an inexplicable nonstandard spacing between two of the banks of output pins. This means that you can’t use regular perfboard with them. To make the design process quicker, [Garrett] has put together an Eagle file that just includes the male header pins. The file also has a line indicating the tall lower board components so you can avoid creating shorts.
Official Arduino Ethernet Shield
Arduino has just released an official ethernet shield. It’s based on the same WizNet W5100 chip that was used in the tiny ethernet board we covered earlier. The W5100 handles the full IP stack and can do TCP or UDP with four simultaneous sockets. The board has a power indicator plus six LEDs to debug the connection. It works with the standard ethernet library. The reset button resets the shield and the Arduino. The SD adapter is not currently supported by the Arduino software.
GPS Logging Arduino Shield
ladyada continues to produce more and more interesting Arduino shields. This new GPS logger plugs into a standard Arduino board and has support for four different GPS receiver modules. On the backside of the board is an SD card slot where it stores the coordinates in a text file. The total runtime can vary from five hours to twenty depending on how you choose to power the device and how you use the device. How often you read the device and whether you maintain the GPS lock will affect the power consumption. Like all of ladyada’s projects, you’ll find a great construction guide and example code on her site.
