Hack: Fit an Arduino on a breadboard
Here is simple hack that allows you to use a breadboad with the Arduino. Alex simply bent the Arduino’s digital IO header so it would fit the standard 0.1” pitch of breadboards.
Via the forum.
This entry was posted in Arduino, hacks and tagged Arduino, breadboard, hack.
Comments
Dirty.
Its way easier to just put the ATMega on the breadboard for a “breadboardunio” – you loose less space that way. Add a ziff for rapid prototyping.
I consider the pin placement some kind of DRM. Not at all prototype friendly.
Yeah, I wonder why the designers decided on such a weird spacing initially. I’m sure they too must have prototyped it on vero board first! So how did they get such a wonky gap?
a smart way to ensure shield excusivety, this way you have to buy shields specificly designed for the Arduino, thus either increasing their shield sales, or further promoting the Arduino when every other manuf makes “Arduino” shields
Massimo said that he fat-fingered the placement in Eagle at one point during the layout and didn’t realize it until it was too late.
If you look closely at the header gaps, it seems the gap on one side is smaller than the gap on the other side. Supposedly this is an attempt to prevent the user from plugging in a shield the wrong-way around; thereby possibly damaging the shield and/or Arduino board. Here’s a picture of the top of an Arduino board:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arduino_Duemilanove_2009b.jpg
Maybe someone who actually owns an Arduino board can confirm this.
Hmm, that sorta makes sense, but I fells they could have implemented this failsafe in a more vero-board/breadboard friendly way. Instead of having such a weird spacing, they could have shifted the headers towards the inside of the shield, while maintaining the 2.54mm pitch.
As I alluded to above, Massimo said that the non-2.54mm-aligned gap was a mistake, and not by design.
As it ended up, the gaps are, in fact, different. The upper one is 0.16″ and the bottom one is 0.1″. The rightmost headers are aligned, as are the two on the bottom. So, one can still use protoboard on top as a shield and hit three out of four of the headers.
I’ve always said “Friends don’t let friends buy Arduinos without 0.1″ aligned headers”, so I only buy ones like the Seeeduino that have the extra PORTB header that is aligned (most others do this, but the Arduino team won’t), or a Boarduino/BBB/RBBB-like board that’s explicitly for breadboarding.