If you have ever seen Jon Oxer, author of the book Practical Arduino, discuss a shield, as he does in this video review of AsyncLabs WiShield for Arduino, you would probably easily observe that one of his pet peeves is designs that dont let you know shield pin assignments when using the shield.
So when a discussion began in this forum thread http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1284962949 about whether an up to date shield pin usage list existed Jon, to copy a popular DirecTV Opulence Commercial, Jumped In It.
A little less than 18 hours after after Jon entered the conversation there was a domain and quite a bit of development on a closed site, from his thread report:
I’ve made a little bit of progress on this. I now have the database structure in place with a few shields inserted for testing, and I’ve created a basic public UI that lets you browse through a list of brands, then through a list of shields for each brand, then see the details of each shield including a description, a link to the manufacturer’s site, an image of the shield, the pin assignments, and notes. There’s no visual style applied at all so far, just black text on a plain white page.
While it’s still under early development I have it showing nothing publicly unless it’s accessed by my IP address, but ultimately it will live here:
The system already accepts arguments of brand and board in the URL, so for example to view a list of all shields manufactured by Gravitech I can do this:
http://shieldlist.org/gravitech
Or to see details of a specific shield I can do this:
http://shieldlist.org/gravitech/7seg
Right now you won’t be able to see anything at those URLs since it only works for me until I remove the IP restriction.
Yesterday, October 9th, a little over 48 hours later Jon lifted the IP restriction and a great arduino resource was born.
Not only is it a good way to look up specific pin information for a specific shield, the format also allows you to browse to see what shields are available as well as contact info, which may let you discover a shield you need that you didn’t even know existed.
As of this time the dataset currently contains 61 boards with full images and descriptions and is growing rapidly.
Bravo Jon Bravo
