Arduino Design Trick: Make an Upside-Down Shield

Arduino Technology
Arduino Design Trick: Make an Upside-Down Shield

If you’ve ever tried to make an Arduino shield at home using a 1-sided circuit board, you’ll appreciate how difficult it can be to both solder connectors onto the bottom side of the board and components to the top. It’s possible to use extra long headers that you can stick through the top, however I like Stephen Hobley’s FlipShield idea better. He decided to turn the problem around, and instead of making a shield that plugs into an Arduino, he created a board that you plug an Arduino onto. This solves the connector problem, since the components are now on the same side of the board as the connectors. In addition, it also allows you to make shields that are larger than the Arduino itself, which can come in handy!

Anyone want to guess what the board he is making does?

10 thoughts on “Arduino Design Trick: Make an Upside-Down Shield

  1. John Laur says:

    No idea what it does, but I have done this too – it works really well. I had built a shield that stacked between the arduino and the ethernet shield, but when I needed to move to the ethernet shield v2 I had to have the arduino and the ethernet shield directly connected. There was not room in the enclosure for both boards to sit underneath though. So I designed a mezzanine board that plug into a normal shield and then allows the arduino and ethernet module to be plugged in (inverted) above it. It has some extra circuitry on it, but I think that a more generic ‘arduino inverter’ shield might have its uses.

  2. ikirudennis says:

    It looks like this thing turns a printer parallel port into midi in/out.

  3. Jacob Praamsma Alifrangis says:

    Judging by the connectors it’s an IEC Interface for commodore 64/128 VIC-20 Systems.

  4. Rugged Circuits says:

    Our Aussie Shield had the same idea!

    http://ruggedcircuits.com/html/aussie_shield.html

    Rugged Circuits

  5. Rugged Circuits says:

    Our Aussie Shield had the same idea!

    http://ruggedcircuits.com/html/aussie_shield.html

    Rugged Circuits

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