i have received a mega board through the post, oooh so excited.
i have the breadboard and other such things, doing tests and all that.
but one thing that has always plagued my mind even before i got the board.
how do you make a final build?
meaning, say i have my arduino all ready to rock, i have all my pots and wires etc. i dont want to use the breadboard, obviously, for the final build. so how do i go about making my controller into a 'controller' rather than something that looks like a scruffy car boot sale.
i know i would need a board of some type to solder everything, but there just does not seem to be any info on doing this.
so how do i go about soldering everything together with my arduino mega board?
in the Arduino world, the plug in boards are called shields and you can buy them
or make them yourself (although diy is tricky because the pin spacing is not quite correct between two of the pins).
I'm a fan of the Arduino Mini and Pro Mini, both of which have the footprint of a 24pin DIL chip so can be easily plugged into two rows of headers in a veroboard or PCB.
Note that at a certain point, as your skills mature, you may want to integrate the microprocessor used in the Arduino into your design; at that point, it would no longer be an Arduino, though the chip may still be running the boot loader (although in the real final design, you may want to eliminate this, too). If you do run the boot loader, bring out the pins needed for serial communications to a header; that way, in the future (if needed), the device could still be "field-programmed" using an FTDI cable or breakout board.
Realize that the Arduino is just a particular system and layout, based upon a widely used (and low cost) microcontroller family from Atmel; what you do with it is up to your imagination in the end...
Cr0sh is right on the money - again :). I use the Arduino for working out a sketch, breadboarding to get the project working. Once it's to where I want it (still gets changed at least twice more) - I will layout a PCB for the m168 chip, usually a LCD display, then build a complete stand alone board.
The final m168 chip the hex file created by the Arduino IDE burned to the chip using Studio4 and an external programmer, hence loosing the bootloader.
