A general-purpose prototyping shield for the Arduino Duemilanove microcontroller and other boards based on the same header format, such as the Seeeduino and the Arduino Pro.

This design is intended to maximise prototyping area by extending the plain pads right to the ends of the board, which also makes it easier to fit horizontal PCB-mount sockets that need to overlap the edge. Note that this design uses surface-mount parts in 0805 packaging for supporting components such as smoothing capacitors, status LEDs, and associated current limiting resistors, but has custom oversized 0805 pads to make it easier to hand-solder.

This shield is designed and copyrighted by Jon Oxer and Marc Alexander.  Jon Oxer is the author of an upcoming book called "Practical Arduino".  The PracticalArduino.com website,  contains great information on many of the projects that are going to be included in book.  Check out the news item where he describes these shields here, and see it in action creating a speech synthesizer.

Features:

• - Reset button wired through to Arduino reset pin.
• - Additional momentary button (output biased high by 10k resistor and pulled low by the button).
• - Two general-purpose SMT LEDs wired to VCC (drive low to illuminate).
• - Pads for 2 surface-mount 100nF smoothing capacitors.
• - Parts overlay on both the top and the bottom so you can see what you are connecting without having to keep turning the board over.

Note:  This product item is for the bare PCB, a kit with all parts required to make a fully functional protoshield will be available soon.