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December 16, 2006

New Shield Connects Phidgets Sensors to Arduino Board

I just received my first Arduino Shield PCB design in the mail from Advanced Circuits. We have lots of Phidgets sensors lying around in the lab; they may be a bit pricey, but their plug-and-play model is sure handy when you're in a hurry. This PCB makes it easy to connect these sensors to the Arduino platform. The board has six Phidgets (aka 3 pin Molex C-GRID) connectors which are routed directly to the Arduino's A2D ports. It also breaks out 8 bits of digital IO to .1" headers and provides the all-important reset switch and status LED.

PCB design - Eagle files (based on Tom Igoe's Protoshield): Parts:
  • You will need 6 Molex connectors. They are about $1 each when bought in small quantities from Digikey, and are available either with Gold or Tin leads (Tin is cheaper):
  • Resistors: 2x10k (for reset circuit) + 1x330 (for LED)
  • Reset switch: standard 0.25" tactile pushbutton.
    Jameco #153252.
  • Single row headers: buy a strip of 40 and cut shorter strips of 4 (power from Arduino), 6 (analog in to Arduino), 2x8 (digital IO to/from Arduino), 1x8 (digital IO header on shield).
    Jameco #160882.
  • Double row headers: one strip of 8 doubles (16 contacts) to complete the digital IO header on the shield.
    Jameco# 109568 (16 contacts); or 117197 (80 contacts - cut to size).
  • 1 LED - I recommend a T1 size, but really, any standard LED should do.
  • Female header (this goes on the bottom of connector ICSP to get to reset function
  • Filtering capacitor, if needed
Note: this shield was designed for the original Arduino and does not use the 6-pin power+reset header the Diecimila has. I'll have to investigate whether there is enough space for the 6 pin header for the next iteration. Posted by Bjoern Hartmann at December 16, 2006 3:39 AM