Arduino Esplora Xbee Shield

[chummer1010]

Hello everyone,

This thread, I guess will be a blog or journal of my progress in something I am working on, which is a shield for an Esplora Board to mount your Xbee on, similar to this for an Uno. I thought of making this when designing this on perfboard for the remote controlled robotic arm that I am working on.

The connections are pretty simple:





However, the biggest challenge will be making this as compact as possible, and possible no bigger than the Esplora itself. Here is the first design of the PCB (not fully made to scale):



However there are a few flaws:

- It is very large.

Even though this first design wasn't intended to be to scale, the PCB is almost twice the height as the Esplora. Also, if it is too wide, it could potentially cover the photo resistor on the board.

- There are no headers for the unused pins.

There are 4 I/O pins that are difficult to access with this design. However, I don't know when I would need them if I'm using the board to control something else wirelessly.


You gotta start somewhere I guess. For design two, I'll focus mainly on making this as compact as possible. If any of you guys have any suggestions or comments (and I'm sure you will), please let me know what else could be improved.

Thanks!

marco

[chummer1010]

After a little bit of digging, I found out that the width between the two sets of head pins on an Esplora is 55mm, and 22mm on the Xbee. Now that I have those measurements, I can make a scale PCB design.

[chummer1010]

After looking over V1, I noticed that literally all the connections were incorrect... Here is a design with the correct connections, and is a little smaller.

[Isaac96]

I believe the XBee has 2 mm pin spacing.