I have a TFT display shield on a clone Mega2560 board. Pins on the display are so short that there is no room for other connections to the Mega board.
I have get some extension pin headers. And I should tell about this to shield maker. And I know that nothing changes, but I can always try.
I don't understand this. How would longer pins allow you to make other connections to the Mega board?
Maybe only the pins actually required by the shield are present. If so, then longer pins could offer the opportunity to plug other jumpers into the Mega directly between the Mega and the shield
@LMI1 is that what you have in mind ?
Wow. That thing sure is monopolizing a lot of pins unnecessarily!
The typical approach is to use passthrough headers on shields, so all the pins below are still accessible above. It might be that the creator of this shield would have considered that unnecessary because this shield will always be the top one in a stack of shields due to the need for the user to see the display.
A "90 degree adapter shield" that has 90 degree female headers (or perhaps just regular headers to keep it more compact) to provide access to pins from the side in addition to passthrough headers providing access above for shields would be cool.
With the exception of the off-grid header and the mega's double-row header, making one would be super fast and easy with stripboard or protoboard. It would even be easy to break out one row of the double row header with a protoboard (more of a hassle on a stripboard due to the header being parallel to the strips). That would probably provide more than enough pins anyway.
Agreed. The other approach would be for the shield maker to cut away the PCB over those unused sockets. It looks like there would still be room for the screen. But passthroughs would be the most elegant.
I think passthrough headers wouldn't work here because the display is larger the Arduino Mega. If I understand passthrough connector correctly.
Something similar connector Arduino uses would work with those pins the shield uses, display in this case, and a 90 degrees pin header for others, I use.
female pin header gives plenty of hits and 90 pin header gives hits, too.
Use a proto shield under the display. It already has passthrough pins.
On the photo it looks smaller. But still, the adapter shield sounds great.
