Hi all,
Is there a company that will manufacture a custom shield pcb specifically in the Arduino footprint, or do I need to completely measure and design it myself and send those drawings to a pcb maker?
PCB companies will generally manufacture the PCB in whatever shape you specify. You can get Eagle files for a number of open source shields and use them as a basis for your board layout.
We do custom Arduino shield design. Check out one of our recent ones, a six channel quadrature decoder board for the Arduino Mega:
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The Rugged Circuits Yellowjacket: 802.11 WiFi module with ATmega328P microcontroller, only 1.6" x 1.2", bootloader
Are you asking someone to develop a shield for you or are you asking if a company will take your design and fit onto an arduino foot print? If you know how to design a board then fitting it on arduino footprint is easy. Just follow links provided by johnwasser. sparkfun also has EAGLE part library that includes several arduino foot print parts.
Seems like Eagle costs a fair amount--the free version is pretty restricted, no? The hobbyist version (no commercial use) is $125.
ExpressPCB uses their own proprietary software--free--and there's an arduino shield footprint available:
EAGLE has a free version but if you design boards intended to be sold, you can go with lite version only $59 and limit is 100mm*80mm.