Arduino Shield Looking Outwards

The touch shield allows for a tactile interactive color display surface on the arduino. This shield gives the possibility for small screen based operations that can have a dialogue with a larger/external work. My first thought was of making a personalized control board for a rocket or a creature. To use the shield, the viewer has to hold the arduino or put in on a nearby surface. I like this proximity feature and the intimacy it and its tactile nature provide.

The wave shield allows a project to have medium quality sound playback at varying volumes. This shield has emotional value to me as I have tried to use audio additions with arduino before, with no success. The shield only works with .wav files, which, as a Windows user, I find a pleasant surprise in a world of demanding mp3 or aiff files. This shield is also relatively cheap, and makes me excited to add audio depth and content to my electronic work.

Gameduino is an adapter/sort of shield for running games off of. It has nicer(but not great) graphics capabilities than a regular arduino, and comes with a VGA output and an output for stereo speakers. I was really drawn to the built in VGA, which would allow a project to incorporate a possible physical object related to the arduino and screen based graphics from a projector.

I like that these shields allow the electronics to be transformed from colorful chunks of metal to socially important artifacts. Even browsing the products gave me a sense of social concerns—especially with the attention given to data logging and GPS shields.