[McHUG] Arduino Shields

[Rich Mitchell]

We had our Meet-to-Eat on Sunday.  One of the topics that came up was shields for the Arduino.  If you think of modules or libraries as pluggable software components, then you can think of shields as pluggable hardware components.  I am going to try to explore that area a bit.  Shields fit on top of a Duemilanove or other Arduino board and hold components specific to a function.  To study this more I have ordered the following:

>From NKC Electronics - an Arduino Duemilanove so I have a baseline shield capable module for reference.  3 Protoshield PCB boards and a Protoshield Kit, also two sets of stackable headers.  I have also ordered from Modern Device - a new BBB kit with the 328, a USB BUB board kit and an LCD117 serial kit.  The plan is to use one of the Protoshield PCB boards with the BBB to create a cheap version of a shield compatible Arduino.  I will use the other two Protoshield PCB boards to create a USB BUB shield (for programming the cheap Arduino) and an LCD117 shield (so I can add an LCD to the stack even though the LCD itself may be off to the side).  I hope to use the Protoshield kit to build a 443MHz receiver shield so I can listen to a PICetSat and with the LCD shield watch it (using Steve's code I hope).

Anyway for the Feb club meeting and perhaps a meet to eat before that - I hope to present the idea of shields as a cool way to develop with the Arduino or Freeduino.

After the board meeting last night some of us were throwing around the idea of a K3MMT memorial balloon launch.  One of the last activities Frank attended was the balloon launch at Pat's.  Maybe we should do a K3MMT memorial launch big time - like something that would reach 100,000 feet.

Rich
N3III

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McHUG - Physical Computing ;) 
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