What are you folks using for perfboard shields? I like the style that has 3 pads tied together, and maybe with some Ground and Vcc busses, but nothing too fancy or custom. I ended up buying a board at Radio Shack, and cutting it down to size on the table saw. It's not perfect, and I need to get some of those offset 8 pin headers that they have at CuteDigi, but still, it's better than any of the commercial alternatives that I could find.
And why is there that weird spacing between the two 8 pin connections?!
I made a stripboard lcd shield which I was pretty happy with! Took a little fiddling to get it working... (I'd bent the headers to make connections, no connection between arduino + lcd, bit stupid on reflection). I just cut a board to size and whacked the headers in, then soldered everything together.
Apparently the weird spacing just a design flaw, although it is a pain to have to use offset headers!
And why is there that weird spacing between the two 8 pin connections?!
It was an design error that slipped in at the last moment in the rush to produce the very first batch of arduino boards. They either couldn't afford to redo the boards or didn't have the time to correct it, or both. Anyway once the design was released to the wild and lots of 3rd party shields started to be designed and sold to the public, it just became impossible to correct it without cause incompatibility for existing hardware already out there.
There have been several cleaver workarounds, you mentioned the 'bent pins' solution. Also some arduino clone board makers put in an additional set of shield holes with proper spacing, so that you just have to populate the board with extra header connectors and you can then use either the normal arduino spacing or standard .1" spaced protoboards. Example:
It seems to me that there would be a market for a <$10 perfboard shield kit that would include the board and headers (including the bent ones!). I'd buy 'em! The boards that I've seen seem to have too much stuff that I'm not going to use.
This is intended to become an outdoor wifi Tele-Robot, on an RC truck chassis, and with pan/tilt camera, GPS, accelerometers, compass, motion encoder and distance sensors. And a budget of about $300. The idea is that all the real thinking is done at the other end of the wifi link. All the Arduino has to do is collect the information and send it out.
At the moment, it looks like the one shield will do it, accommodating the GPS, compass / accelerometer, and headers to the other sensors.
