By far one of the most annoying things about prototyping with Arduino has been connecting and disconnecting projects to and from the board. I would connect up a breadboard to the various pins using individual wires. That worked fine until I wanted to disconnect it, which would happen all the time. Perhaps I had to wait on a part to arrive. Or maybe I got stuck, or just bored, and wanted to work on something else. Just disconnecting a project from Arduino would disrupt the whole thing, and then I’d have to remember how to wire it up again. This was painful.
So I created a little platform for myself to make connections to the Arduino easy. Details posted at Arduino Box Header Platform.
I know exactly what you mean!
On my Mega I have a DFRobot prototyping shield, I put a 32 pin box header on it and use an old PC floppy cable to connect to pro-typing boards or breadboards.
I have a different version which uses one 30-40 wire ribbon cable to pass all arduino connections to the breadboard. It's being manufactured right now! ]
I call it phi-connect. No pics yet but will certainly post.
I do have a couple of features I didn't see on your board though.
This kind of board should replace the original proto-shield as a much more expendable way of prototyping->permanent installment. You can solder the header to a perf-board. Hope we both make Arduinoists happier!
liudr:
Awesome, you beat me to it.
...
This kind of board should replace the original proto-shield as a much more expendable way of prototyping->permanent installment. You can solder the header to a perf-board. Hope we both make Arduinoists happier!
Thanks! Yeah, combining with a perfboard is certainly a direction one could go in. I prefer the "one job, one tool" mindset, which is why I made it further stackable. If I wanted a perfboard, I'd just stack it on top.
It's interesting about the 30-40 wire cable... You can see I have a 20-pin header, but I found that everything I've wanted to connect so far only uses the 10-pin connectors. So on the other PCB's I got back, I have never even soldered on the 20-pin.