Arduino header spacing.

Development Boards Arduino
1

Not really post for help. More a statement expressing my thoughts.

I’ve just got a new arduino Uno and a proto shield. I had plans on making circuits to use with the arduino on strip/matrix board and using standard single header pins to line up with the arduino. To my suprise, the arduino headers dont all line up with the holes in the boards. Now I am very suprised at this as I would have thought that with arduino being open source and all that, that they would promote this ‘tinkering’ technique. But no. guess its either 1)only use a number of pins that you can get to line up, b) interface your strip board circuit through a proto shield with some standard spaced headers or c) have pcb’s made.

I know the idea of a proto shield is to use it for this purpose. But, not all circuits will fit onto the proto shield so it would have been nice to solder up a board and put the headers on 1 end to mount the arduino. Maybe I’m looking at it all wrong, but thats how I saw things happening.

Rant over, thanks for listening.

2

I’ve never seen an explanation of that design feature. Perhaps they expected that people would only use PCBs for interfacing, or wires plugged into the sockets.

Here is my dimensioned version of the Duemilanove board which gives the connector positions:

http://www.leonheller.com/images/Arduino.jpg

I can’t see why they didn’t make the distance between the two upper connectors 0.2", as with the lower connectors, rather than 0.16"

3

leon_heller:
I’ve never seen an explanation of that design feature.

Heh, I don’t know how you’ve missed it–it’s probably one of the most common Arduino FAQs. :slight_smile:

The “official” answer is here: http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaB … 2541/13#13

As for solutions, [this blog post discusses one and the [Arduino Offset Header - 8 Pin mentioned is available from SparkFun.

I think it’s a small but unfortunate mistake however after a certain point the Arduino team has maintained it would inconvenience too many shield manufacturers to correct it–and AFAIK none of the clones with “correct” spacing have particularly taken off.

–Philip;](http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9374)](Arduino Offset Header | Project Blog)

4

Well that explains that one then. Thanks chaps. Thought it was strange like.

5

Wow, the offset headers are bloody hard to find here in the UK. The search will continue in the morning…

6

You can manually bend standard headers for a similar result.

–Philip;