I've been intrigued by the Arduino for some time and decided to pick one up finally. I'm still fairly new to the concept, but I have a few years of experience with electronics, it's just been awhile :~
I ended up getting an Arduino Mega 2560, 128x64 LCD, an analogue Light Detect Resistor (1 wire), and a serial SHT10 Temperature / Humidity sensor (2 wire).
I had no issues hooking up the LCD and getting GLCD 3 running, but I'm stumped at connecting the sensors.
They were designed to plug into the Sensor Shield, but I'm wondering if it's at all possible to just hook them up directly or with a breadboard to the Arduino? I currently only have the two sensors and plan on maybe adding one more in the future, so the sensor shield seems a bit overkill to me, and I'm already using a handful of the digital pins for the LCD.
Most of those sensors designed to plug into a "sensor shield" are using simple 3 wire connections, one for ground, one for +5vdc and one as a signal wire to be routed to either a digital input pin or a analog input pin depending on the type of sensor it is. So you are free to cut off the connector end and just wire things directly in whatever manner you can arrange.
For testing, I use male-male breadboard jumpers like these:
You can plug them into the female sensor connectors, and the female shield connectors. Good enough to verify your code, not good enough for a (semi) permanent installation. For something more sturdy, I'm fond of NKC's protoboards: http://store.nkcelectronics.com/freeduino-arduino-protoshield-kit.html.
Solder in some male headers and wire them to your pins of choice. Of course, this is similar to the sensor shields.
