Bob writes -
The Arduino board is an inexpensive, open-source microcontroller board. The development environment is also open-source and freely downloadable.The Arduino board is sold in the United States by sparkfun.com. Shields are extension boards that can combine with the Arduino main board to extend it’s capabilities. That gets us to the main point here. The ProtoShield kit from SparkFun adds a couple of LEDs, switches, and an optional solderless breadboard making prototyping that much simpler.
I recently purchased an Arduino board and ProtoShield, but wasn’t able to find much information about assembly and use of the ProtoShield. So, I decided a short tutorial showing how I put together the ProtoShield might be useful to others. Here goes.
atomicsalad: Tutorial: SparkFun ProtoShield Assembly + Use – Link.
i wish i had got this kit, i got the kit sold at sgbotics, and while its great and matches the blue arduino ng better (as it is also blue) it has one major blunder, the pins for the icsp connector are for some reason located in the top leftish corner of the board (around the digital pins 11-12 or so. Annoying, cause the reset button on the top of the board doesn’t do anything otherwise. i corrected it with a few wires, but man that annoyed me. I’ve never seen any arduino board with pins there, really baffling