Review of MEGAshield KIT for Arduino MEGA 2560 R3

Customer Ratings:

#1 The board allows you to stack another board on top of it. The row next to the standard pin location is connected to the pin row. This allows you to use whatever pins you want and leave the rest alone which may pass on to the card you stack on top. This is true for even the double row of digital pins on the end. Their duplicate is the white strip.

#2 The double row connected in the middle is positive and negative. You select 3.3v or 5v by soldering in a jumper.

#3 TWI/I2C has 4 connections in addition to the standard connections on pins 20 & 21.

#1 is the most important and I couldn't find any other board like it.

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This kit met my expectations in every aspect. All the parts that were shown in the photo were included in the package.

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I have bought several of these after breadboarding a number of circuits with the first. They will form the sensor I/O star around a LAMP configured Raspberry Pi whose purpose will only be buffering of data if necessary, and the Xmission of data to the main server.

Honest reviews on MEGAshield KIT for Arduino MEGA 2560 R3

I agree with all the other reviews. This is an excellent board and much better than the board available from Sparkfun, which I own. The only reason I am removing a star is because it was missing the jumper.

I would have liked a component list printed with the package.

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This is by far the most convenient shield for the Arduino Mega that I've seen.

Instead of just a raw board (which would also be ok), there are several great features, such as an I2C bus area, a general purpose switch, and the DIP area. I had trouble finding a spot for some of my larger components (they would cross the VCC/GND bus or some other reserved pin), but ultimately everything fit. More importantly, fitting these components in around the features is a very small price to pay for the enormous convenience gained by all those well thought out hard wirings.

So with all those features, how many components can it realistically fit? On this single shield, I now have a GPS receiver, 3 axis accelerometer, 3 axis rotation rate sensor, magnetometer, altimeter, data logger (all on breakout boards), a piezo speaker, and 2x5 pin connector drawn to 10 of the Arudino's pins, and I still could fit a level shifter and a small SMD component. I can't really expect more on a prototyping board.

Even if I had a stack of other types of Mega shields just sitting on my desk, I'd still buy this shield to save myself all the little headaches. Great board.