Here is the picture of a brand new Arduino Shield for the NRF24L01 on top of an Arduino UNO:
It’s the first version and it works :-) so I finally soldered a transceiver directly onto it.
Signal layout
The signals for the SPI bus come from the ICSP connector to make it compatible to Arduino boards that do not have the classic ATmega328 (2009, UNO) but use other processor ICs like Leonardo, Mega. Here the MIIS, MOSI and SCK signals are not D12,D11 and D9. Using the ICSP connector is compatible.
The CSN and CE signals can be connected to pin D7 and D8 by using little solder drops on top of the shield that you can see on the right. Using these 2 pins because they do not conflict with other cards I use (Ethernet, SDCard). Initialize the RF24 radio class by using:
RF24 radio(7,8);
If other pins must be used, the 2 solder pads can be kept open and some wires can be used to pass the signals.
The IRQ signal is available on pin D3 the same way, but I don’t use it yet.
The rest of the shield has a permanent breadboard layout for small robust implementations.
In the back you can see another connector for I2C bus that I use to connect other hardware like LCD panels.
Prototypes:
Before I had 2 versions in place that I made. The first one was a “flying” transmitter that was perfect for finding the right pins and setup. The second one is sitting on top of an DMX shield.
See also:
Hints on using NRF24L01+ with Arduino
This is a first version of a NRF24L01 shield, especially the breadboard it not perfect. I ordered more than I need so if you are working on a NRF24L01 project and like to have one – let me know. (first come first serve)
