1Sheeld Review

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received the 1Sheeld, SainSmart, and DIYmall products for free so that I could provide product feedback to the company and post a product review. I was not required to write a positive review and I do not rate products higher than they should have been. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's requirements.

NOTE: For readers of my blog, you can use the discount code "bigboystoys" (which expires September 20th, 2015) to get a 25% discount at ( http://1sheeld.com/buy ).

I recently received a 1Sheeld for Arduino and Android for a product review. The package just included the 1Sheeld device itself, the documentation and Android software is online.

This product is very interesting, because it allows you to use your Android smartphone or tablet to act as various shields for your Arduino device.  This approach can help the new user simulate various input/output devices without actually wiring any hardware or allows the experienced user to make some creative projects.

Top of 1Sheeld

Bottom of 1Sheeld

The shields that this 1Sheeld can emulate are grouped as follows:

Basic I/O: Buzzer Shield , Gamepad Shield , LED Shield , Toggle Button Shield , Seven Segments Shield , Slider Shield , Push Button Shield

Communication: Email Shield , Skype Shield , SMS Shield , Phone Shield , Internet Shield

Sensors: Accelerometer Shield , GPS Shield , Gyroscope Shield , Mic Shield , Proximity Shield , Magnetometer Shield , Pressure Shield , Gravity Shield , Temperature Shield , Light Sensor Shield , Orientation Shield

Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare

Special: Camera Shield , Music Player Shield , Notifications Shield , Terminal Shield , Text-To-Speech Shield , Voice Recognition Shield , Keyboard Shield , LCD Shield , Clock Shield , Pattern Shield

I used the getting started tutorial ( http://1sheeld.com/tutorials/getting-started/ ) to get everything setup and tested.  If you see a prompt about an update, go ahead and update your board.

Arduino UNO R3 w/ 1Sheeld, OLED display and Nexus 7 running 1Sheeld App

Close up of x/y/z axis information from accelerometer
Left : OLED information is from Arduino/1Sheeld
Right : Nexus 7 screen from 1Sheeld app

Once the 1Sheeld was mounted on my Arduino board and everything was working, I started to play around with various examples and try a few different things.  Here are a few things I tried:

• Tested the advanced “Text to speech” sample which shows the text-to-speech and voice recognition capabilities.
• Created sample code to pull GPS coordinates and display and the LCD shield
• Tested the simple “Internet” sample which connected to a website and displayed the HTML code in the terminal shield
• Pulled x/y/z axis information from accelerometer, displayed on a small OLED screen (as shown above).  My Arduino code had a delay between sampling, so the numbers do not match exactly.

Bottom line: Overall, the 1Sheeld is very impressive - you can use it to mock certain hardware components in projects before you actually setup the hardware or you can actually use your smartphone/tablet as part of your project - a great way to give new life to an old device.

1Sheeld Product Page: www.1sheeld.com
1Sheeld Amazon Product Page: http://amzn.com/B00L2LM3WY

NOTE: For readers of my blog, you can use the discount code "bigboystoys" (which expires September 20th, 2015) to get a 25% discount at ( http://1sheeld.com/buy ).

Other components used/mentioned:

OLED from DIYmall ( check out my review )
Arduino UNO R3, breadboard and jumpers from a SainSmart Basic Start Kit ( check out my review of the kit )