I am new to Arduino and don't have much experience with tinkering. For a project I'd like to use an Arduino board in connection with an XBee-shield and an Ethernet board.
Which would be the easiest hardware configuration for that? I am asking because the obvious choice would be the ethernet shield and the Xbee shield, but I assume that only one shield can be used at a time. Or is it possible to stack shields (e. g. one shield on top of another?)
Maybe the wisest choice would be an Arduino board with an integrated ethernet chip and then using the xbee shield.
Or is it possible to stack shields (e. g. one shield on top of another?)
If the shields are designed to be stackable, they can be stacked. The Ethernet shield I have is designed to have another shield on top of it, as long as the top shield has the extended length pins. The sparkfun XBee shield comes without pins attached, so you can get and use the longer ones.
Most shields are stackable, refer to specifications for each shield to see which are compatible (don't use the same pins for different purposes, aren't too tall). There are Arduino-compatible boards with built-in ethernet, and Xbee, maybe even both, so you might be able to reduce the number of boards if you look around.
thanks for the info. I hope I can get the longer pins. Are you talking about the female headers (2 mm) ? Sorry for the dumb question, I have just started to work with Arduino & Xbee. Or are you talling about the mal pin headers (2,54 mm)? Anyway, what is te desired length?
But I have already noticed that some material is very hard to get in Germany, at least at the time being - might be the christmas time, don't know I just started to tinker with Arduino just before X-Mas. Anyway, those female headers are sold out everywhere;-)