Adding additional shields

[kenjara]

Hi,

I am thinking about getting some shields at some point in the future to add more functionality.

I am currently thinking about adding a Bluetooth shield for remote control and adding a music shield so my robot can make sounds in certain events.

I see you can stack shields but I assume this would not be an option as the rover chassis already uses most of the pins?

Would I therefore need to buy the mega board with the extra pins in order to allow me to add shields?

Thanks,

Shane

[Alan]

Hi Shane,

That's a good question. You're right in assuming that it's going to be a bit tricky to add shields to the robot as pretty much all of the Seeeduino's pins are already used up controlling the robot.

You should be able to add a Bluetooth shield as the RX/TX lines on the Seeeduino are free, although you won't be able to easily use any functionality that relies on extra pins For exaple, I think the Seeedstudio bluetooth shield has a pin that lets you check to see if a connection has been made.

For other shields, then depending upon how you wanted to use the robot, it should be possible to free up some of the Seeeduino pins by disabling certain sensors. For example, the IR corner sensors use up 6 pins in total, if you could live without them, then that would be 6 pins that you could use to control a shield.

Using a Mega is also a possiblilty, as you could move all of the pins used by the robot onto the spare pins of the Mega. However, you should be aware that there can also be issues with using the Mega with some shields. For example, I only found out recently that the SPI pns on the Mega are not in the same place as those on a standard Arduino, so if SPI is used to communicate with a shield, jumper wires may be needed to get everything to work.

Regards

Alan