Thoughts on the Adafruit protoshield

I built another Adafruit proto shield tonight. Good design and fun to do, but there some things to think about. The first thing is do you want them to be stackable? If you want the to be the top shield, or the only shield in your experimental sandwich then they are great as is. But, if you want to make the stackable what do you do? Well, you need to get some stackable headers. Then you need to figure out where those headers should go. Not so complicated, they need to match the pins on the Arduino board you've got. With stackable headers you can keep going and going. Following the Adafruit directions you alternate inside and outside, which doesn't stack. So think about what you want from you proto shield, and order extra parts as needed.

So why would you stack a proto shield? Well, in my case I have a nice Serial Display and an awesome Serial shield from Mark Sproul. So that has to go on top, doesn't make sense to stack things on top of your output display anyway. I've got a nice GPS shield from Adafruit. Oops, that not got stackale headers either. Anyway a decent accelerometer from Adafruit on a break out board. I'd like to combine all that info together, and equipment together. The theory goes, stack on an Arduino the GPS shield, add the accelerometer on a proto shield, and finally the serial shield with a 2x16 read out of the serial data.

I'll get this done, once I've got my stackable headers.