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Here’s what I figured was a useful shield for an arduino that I wanted when I was debugging all that bullshit SPI interaction when I was making the ADT7310/Logshield combination. It’s a passthrough shield that has a breakout for all arduino pins that can be inserted between the arduino and a shield. Not fancy, but let’s you get access to any pin easily without having to grope around and get a spring clip onto a board.

Having said that, I finished the ADT7310/Logshield long before this thing showed up from the boardhaus. Maybe this will be helpful on my next project.

You don’t need me to show you this, here’s the schematic and the board layout. These were done with Eagle, but come on – you could lay these out with an ink marker if you wanted. I hand routed the traces since that was easier than watching the autorouter put tons of vias in.

I started the Eagle design from the Macetech Scaffold (there is a newer version than I used), simply because it has the board outline and header positions right. The Arduino has non-standard pin spacing between the headers for some unfathomable reason, and now that shields are designed around it they can’t change. Another option is to start from a design like the Adafruit protoshield, and just toss out the bits you don’t want.

The two 90-pin connectors are digikey # S5559-ND and # S5561-ND. I’m sure you can get them just about everywhere.

You can get the stacking headers from Adafruit, although I got mine from eBay.

Unfortunately, there was an error at the boardhaus, and the boards showed up… wrong.

At first I thought I messed up the gerbers, which would be pretty damned embarassing considering how simple this board is. I checked with le boardhaus, and it turned out to be manufacturing on their end – the place that actually produced the board mistook the copper layer for a silkscreen layer. I have no clue how you could, they were named correctly and passed all the DRC checks, but hey. They offered to make me another set for free, or give me a refund. I elected to get them to make me a proper set, what the heck.

Of course, the last set took a month to arrive, and I didn’t really want to wait another month before writing this post assembling the board, so I resorted to my gorilla/guerrilla bluewire ratnest fix.

and finally, here it is doing it’s actual job – sandwiched between an Arduino and a shield.