WiFi and NFC shield stack
This is Part 2 of 3-part series of articles. Part 1 talks about ways of tweaking SPI code while Part 3 explains how to deal with incompatible data formats.
Add-on boards AKA “shields” greatly expand the capabilities of standard Arduino platform. Typically, a shield adds a specific peripheral interface; if you need several peripherals you may need to use several shields. The biggest problem in this approach is shield compatibility. Shield developers don’t care much about interoperability and sometimes making several shields work together is difficult. In the previous article on the topic I described a project where USB Host and WiFi shields were made to share the same SPI bus. I have been recently tasked with similar project which required rather heavy hardware modifications. This article shows the necessary steps to build a system consisting of Arduino board, official WiFi Shield and Seeedstudio NFC Shield.
Here is the hardware configuration. Both shields come with stackable headers so they can be plugged into each other. Both shields use ICSP for SPI but connectors are non-stackable so at least one of the shields must have its ICSP connector replaced with the stackable variant ( I sell them). Also, both shields use pin 10 for CS so this pin needs to be re-assigned on one of the shields.
NFC shield has offset female connectors therefore if another shield is placed on top of it ICSP connector won’t mate. It means that stackable ICSP connector shall be placed on WiFi shield. At the same time, since NFC Shield does have a second row of contacts re-assigning pin 10 on this board is easy.
Before we start cutting traces and desoldering connectors, let’s establish a baseline or “a known good state”. I simply grabbed an example from NFC shield library distro called readMifareMemory, compiled, loaded and ran it. I was able to read the card and now I know that my NFC shield is functional.
One other note – both shields are assembled using lead-free solder which has higher melting point. Don’t forget to set the temperature of your soldering iron accordingly – between 700F and 750F.
Continue reading Running multiple slave devices on Arduino SPI bus – hardware modifications.