16.6. Inexpensive DIY Prototyping Shields

One of the most annoying idiosyncrasies of the physical design of standard Arduino boards is that the header connections for plugging in a shield don't sit neatly on a standard 0.1in grid: the top two headers are spaced 160mil (0.16in) apart, which makes it impossible to create a shield using a cheap piece of standard stripboard or perfboard with male breakaway headers soldered on.

To get around this problem, there are some really neat prototyping shields available from a number of suppliers including Adafruit Industries, Seeed Studio, SparkFun, and many others. Figure 16-13 shows a popular protoshield from SparkFun. Commercial prototyping shields vary in features. Some include stackable headers, or an extra reset button so it's easily accessible with the shield mounted on an Arduino, or status LEDs, or mounting pads for surface-mount chips. For most projects, a commercial prototyping shield will do just what you need.