Introduction

USB Host Shield is an add-on board for Arduino development platform. The shield provides USB Host interface, allowing full and low-speed communication with USB devices – keyboards, mice, joysticks, MIDI, digital cameras, Bluetooth, and many others. In USB Shield section of this site you can find many articles describing projects and code examples written for this shield. On this page, I’m giving detailed description of board’s hardware. I start with explaining board’s connectors, pads and jumpers, as well as differences between shield variants. Finally, I demonstrate ways to adapt USB Host Shield to non-typical Arduino boards and less-common power configurations.

This is revision 2.0 of USB Host Shield. Thanks to new interface layout it is now compatible with more Arduinos – not only UNO and Duemilanove, but also big Mega and Mega 2560 work with Standard variant of this shield out of the box. No more SPI re-wiring and code modifications – just solder included stackable connectors (2×3 ICSP connector’s female side should be facing down), plug and play!

This latest version supports Google ADK.

Documents

• Project Page
• USB 2.0 Library
• Hardware Manual
• How to make Google ADK
• Schematics

Shipping List

• USB Host Shield 2.0 (1 unit)9