No, that's not a typo. I meant soldering.

You'll see this post is under a new category: Arduino.

Arduinos are great little programmable microcontrollers which allow quick and easy prototyping of electronics and physical computing projects. I've been playing around (correction: The technical term is "tinkering" ) with Arduinos for a while now but have taken the lazy approach of using solderless breadboards for my projects.

After getting fed up with having wires everywhere and wanting a neater solution, I decided to finally buy the Sparkfun Arduino ProtoShield (v2) and make a nice neat little prototyping "test bed". So, I have, for the first time in over twenty five years (WOW!), picked up a soldering iron and assembled the shield, then attached it to a shiny new red Arduino Duemilanove board:

Well, apart from leaking through a little too much solder on one resistor, not a bad job for the first bit of soldering since around 1983 or so!

Now I can tinker away to my heart's content and keep everything neat and tidy

P.S. Wondering why there's tape around the USB socket? Regardless of how careful and neat you are when soldering in the two push button switches, the contacts of one of them can short against the metal case of the USB socket. The tape stops this.