My son and I are creating a Halloween costume for him that will include an Arduino. I would think that just having the jumper wires attached to the Arduino has too much risk that a wire will fall out. Is it recommend to plug a shield into the Arduino and can you then solder the wires onto that? Or, plug in a terminal block with screws? Or what other method is recommended for securing wiring to an Arduino?
Or am I approaching this the wrong way? I've done a lot of internet searching and I haven't found very clear answers to what I would have guessed is a very common question.
Isn't the Lily Pad stuff good for that? The UNO (assuming that is what you have) is not really good for embedding. It's more of a desktop thing, mainly because of the connectors as you have discovered. A Nano or such is easier to deal with because you can usually use female-female Dupont jumpers to connect pin headers together (with one connector on a Nano pin and one on some module). If it's last minute and you must use the UNO, yes a proto shield is a great idea. Another one, a servo shield because it has tons of power and ground pins as well as I/O pins. The cheap one, not any with a PWM IC on board.
That - as marked - is for the Nano which is far more appropriate for any project unless you have a UNO "shield" which plugs in and performs all the interfacing you need.
If you must use a UNO, get some pin headers, break off a corresponding length to mount in each of the UNO's socket headers, and solder wires to the pin headers. The multiple pin header is vastly more secure than individual "Dupont" wires.
Alternatively, you can get multi-pin housings into which you can transfer the "Dupont" pins.
So what you are saying is that the "Dupont" pins are indeed useless for any form of prototyping with a UNO?
Which implies that UNOs should not be used for prototyping - or indeed any use without a "shield" - rather Nanos with header pins fitted, in a breadboard (of good quality).
Only the male connectors. The female connectors fit fairly reliably on the header pins if they are assembled right. I have lots of devices built that way. For a commercial product, I would choose another method...
That's right. I would never use either gender for a really permanent project. Often, I solder a Nano (or STM32 or ESP) board to a proto board by its pins. Then I can make soldered wire connections to any devices on the protoboard PCB.
Adding something I noticed yesterday... if you look inside a PC, many of the cables attach to the motherboard the same way - female "Dupont" connectors on pin headers. The only difference, the connectors are grouped together in shells. So, the reliability must be pretty good, or the PC industry would have shunned them a long time ago.
