Tiny Stripboard Shield for Arduino

Created on: 26 October 2012

In this project you will build a small Arduino shield from stripboard that only uses some of the Arduino pins. The shield is intended for building small projects on, some of which will be published on this website.

The Tiny Stripboard Shield was designed for these reasons:

• Cheap for hobby and home use
• Uses easy to get stripboard and standard height pin headers
• Great for small projects that you want to move from breadboard to a shield at low cost
• Helps Arduino beginners and hobbyists to build their own small shields and improve soldering skills
• It is a platform for building a number of Arduino shield projects on that will be presented on this website

Here you can see what the completed stripboard shield looks like underneath:

Project Parts and Tools

Parts

To build this project, you will need a piece of stripboard that will be cut to be 20 holes long (along the stripboard conductor length) by 13 holes wide.

Single row pin headers that have pin spacing of 2.54mm are also needed: two 6 pin headers and one 8 pin header, or cut the required headers from a longer header such as a 40 pin header.

Books that may interest you:

Tools

You will need a drill bit of about 3.5mm diameter for breaking the stripboard tracks. A file will be needed for filing the stripboard edges clean after cutting the stripboard to size. A vice will be needed to hold the board while filing. Long nose pliers, half-round nose pliers or similar will also be needed.

You will need your soldering equipment: A soldering iron and solder wire.

Shield Construction

It is important not to power up the Arduino with the shield plugged in as this will short out pins on one side of the Arduino to pins on the other side of the Arduino.

After building a project on the shield, the tracks will be broken at various places so that no Arduino pins will be shorted out.

This video shows how to build the shield.

The idea is to solder the pin headers to the board upside-down as shown in the video. The black insulation of the pin headers is then pushed to the other side of the pins – against the board. The pin headers soldered to the board can be seen in the photo below.