I have posted a few pictures of my homebrew LCD shield. It isn't as pretty as I would like, but it is pretty good for a first try. The LCD has male pin headers on it that plug in to the board. I can install a new on easily if, for some reason, I should kill this one.
I connected a couple of female inline headers to allow access to the digital pins that are not being used by the LCD. A future version might have a full row of inputs, rather than just the remaining ones.
There are 6 buttons. One is a reset button while the other 5 are used with the analog inputs. I turn on the internal pull-ups in the Arduino when I use the buttons, which are connected to ground. When I'm not using the buttons, I still have access to the power and analog input pins via a female inline header. As long as you don't press a button, you don't interfere with the inputs while you're in analog input mode.
This should provide a nice platform for working with inputs while employing a human readable interface at the same time.
The board I used has standard spaced holes, so I bent the pins on one set so that they would line up. I don't have pictures of that. It would be nice if there were some circuit boards that were drilled for arduino so anyone could build a prototype thing-a-ma-jig like this on their own.
The holes in the center area are on a standard grid, so you can put header connectors in them and plug in a standard perfboard.
And they're handy for lots of uses: I built one with extended male headers, and female header connectors and machine-pin sockets in the inner holes, so I can easily connect it to solderless breadboards, or almost any sort of prototype.
If you have something with lots of wires (like, say, an LCD), you can dedicated one of those boards, and solder the wires to it. That makes it easy to disconnect and reconnect your gadget without mixing up the wires when you re-assemble it.
Did you have trouble with 2 banks of headers also not being on a 0.1" grid? I tried the pin bending technique at one point so I had pins going to digital 0-13 but when I added headers for the analog and power connectors, they didn't line up on a 0.1" grid compared to the digital pins.
Sorry if that's hard to read, it's way too early here.
I guess I explained it poorly. I have pin 8 and on bent so digital pins 0-13, gnd, and AREF all fit. Now I try to attach a second row of pins for analog pins 0-5 and it won't fit with the first row. It's either too close or too far.
If you don't have any pins from 8 onwards then the other sets of pins should fit without issue. Is this not the case with what you're trying? (I know you're wanting to use pins 8 onwards eventually.)
I only bent the pins 8-13. If you were to only install the analog pins and digital pins 0-7, they all line up fine with each other (0.1" spacing). Pins 8-13 are the ones that are offset by an odd amount.
Thanks, it's been extremely helpful for my project. My brother is an amateur photographer and wants to take high-speed photos of water droplet splatters, etc. The plan, which is about half-way there in software, is to manually set a delay time, arm the trigger, trigger the micro, count down for the user-specified time, and shoot the photo. These darned things are $1,000+ USD. We plan to share when it's finished.
