I was thinking of a project that would require both sound (wave shield) and a stepper driver board. Can you stack them or combine them in any way? I don't know a lot about the Arduino yet, but if you can connect a shield on top of the main board, it sure would nice to just keep stacking them in some way. Either that, or maybe solder on an expansion connector to connect another shield off to the side?
Some shields can be stacked. Some can not. Depends mostly on the design of the shields. The component placement on the wave shield precludes stacking another shield on top of it.
Whether you could put it on top, or not, depends on which stepper driver board you are considering.
You'll also need to look at which pins each shield uses. Sometimes the pins are controllable, sometimes not.
I am not familiar with each of those shields but as long as arduino's voltage regulators can handle the power draw from the combined sheilds and there are no pin conflictions then you should be alright.
Start by looking into what pins each shield uses and how much power (and what voltage 3.3V or 5V) each shield uses.
Thanks everybody. That answers the question. And I have now seen a shield stacked on top of the Arduino board with it's own pin header so you could stack yet another or at least get to the pins easily. So this is just a bus of some kind. Time to learn the schematics
There are 2 great audio boards out there, the waveshield and the mp3shield for what I want. They both take an SD card and let you put audio files on them and play them to an amplified set of speakers under program control. The MP3 is 3 times as expensive, but plays high quality music, etc. The wavshield takes regular, uncompressed audio files. Maybe they will add a codec to take compressed files, but hey, you can fit more than I need onto an SD card anyway.
PaulS: Are you talking about the Adafruit Wave Shield? Adafruit Wave Shield for Arduino Kit [v1.1] : ID 94 : $22.00 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits
You can stack it. It's the middle board, Duel on bottom, Proto on top.
From that top picture, it does not look like the top board is parallel to the other boards.
From the pictures on ladyada's site, it did not look like another shield would fit on top, due to the volume control and a capacitor on the other corner being too wide/tall.
No, it sits flat. The volume control doesn't get in the way and they must have changed capacitors because they are little black guys the size of the regulator. The highest part of the entire thing is the headphone jack, but it doesn't get in the way of stacking as long as you use tall enough headers. You could stack a transformer on a shield if you used headers that are tall enough.
Stacks clean and works correctly. I give it my stacking stamp of approval.