

The first step might be the most obvious, but it’s tempting to overlook the first step in starting an Arduino shield board design: find the mechanical dimensions of your Arduino shield and the connector pinouts. Throughout this article and in some upcoming articles/videos, we’ll show several tutorials on how to use Arduino and shield boards, including some tutorials on application development. If you’re just learning how to use PCB design software and you want to create a custom shield, go download CircuitMaker, it’s free to download and free to use. If you’ve never designed your own Arduino shield board, follow along with the instructions shown below. You can even design these boards to be reconfigurable if you like, similar to the shield board shown above. These boards have the same form factor and board-to-board connection that matches your favorite Arduino base board, but you have freedom to control many of the basic aspects of the layout in your shield board.

Altium will never give your email address to any third party.Are you ready to connect custom circuits to your Arduino, but you’re tired of using a breadboard to build up your circuits? It sounds like it’s time for you to design a custom Arduino shield. You also acknowledge that by signing up to use CircuitMaker, you agree that Altium can send you occasional emails with news about CircuitMaker and our partner service, components, and reference designs.


Please refer to the exact terms of the GPL and LGPL at (Free Software Foundation) or (Open Source Initiative) regarding your rights under said licenses. By checking the “I agree” line below, you acknowledge that any project you post, including any design files and source code, will be public information and may be subject to one or more open source software or hardware licenses. The projects created using CircuitMaker may include certain open source software or hardware designs originated from third parties that is subject to the GNU General Public License (GPL), GNU Library/Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and different and/or additional copyright licenses, disclaimers, and notices.
