LCD + menu buttons = Just what I needed.

As this is the top shield for a project, I ditched the included headers and used break-away male headers with the pins pointed downward and soldered on the top of the board. No female connectors but no lost as far as my project is concerned.

The wiki offers sample code with little to no documentation and that code is wrong, at least for this version of the board. There's no way to change the wiki so I'll just leave this here:

There are some magic #define's at the top that set values for Rbase, Rup, Rdown, Rleft, Rright, and Rselect. These values are the resistor values (in K Ohms) attached to the respective buttons but they are wrong, at least for V2 of the board. A quick glance at the schematics will show the the correct values should be:

Rbase : 10 Rup : 100 Rdown : 75 Rleft : 51 Rright : 39 Rselect : 15

This will get the code to work correctly and help you see what's going on.

Apart from the documentation, If there were one thing that would like to see it would be some type of button extenders (silicone? plastic caps?) that would allow this to be mounted in a box.

Good backlight, buttons are nice and clicky - software library is complete and has good examples.

The buttons didn't work out of the box for me, in any of the sample code. The resistances were all wrong! Luckily I had an LCD shield, so I just had the LCD display the button ADC values and plugged them in; working perfectly ever since.

I would like the ability to switch the button-read input... otherwise worked well.

This is my first shield to go along with my first Arduino board (SparkFun RedBoard), and it was a good choice. For those somewhat new to electronics and Arduino, this shield is quite easy to understand. The sample code is a different story. Keep in mind you will need to solder on the headers to attach this shield to an Arduino.

All of the buttons have a different value resistor tied to ground and analog pin A0, which should give you a different value if you analogRead() pin A0. This keeps the analog pin usage to a minimum, as well as allows you to push more than one button at a time (which may not be that useful with this button arrangement). You can also set the LED backlight brightness by writing via analogWrite() to pin 10 a value of 0 to 255 (this outputs a PWM signal at a duty cycle defined by your input value).

The quality of this board is pretty good, but my OCD kicked in when I saw the LCD soldered in not completely straight. The stackable headers are not useful for stacking something on top of the LCD, but are for breadboard prototyping.

The price is good, seeing that the same price only gets you a SparkFun branded display on this site. Overall, I would recommend this shield to anyone.

It works and it's easy to use. Very easy way to add a user interface to your project.

But... It uses 7 i/o pins! That's a lot for some projects, it only leaves you 12 i/o's on an Uno. So you have to plan your project around this limited amount of i/o.

And... Beware, the older version had different resistor values or something, so code on the web written for that version will need the analog values for each button tweaked.

But it works fine. You just have to plan for these limitations.

I'm using one of these to show status on an autonomous (RoboMagellan) robot. It was simple to set up and start using and, having taken the brunt of a couple of rollover crashes, I can report it's pretty tough too.

One caveat is the documentation, which is, initially at least, confusing.

In theory this has all the features I'd want, except that the designers tried to save pins. The R/W (read/write) pin on the HD44780 isn't connected, which breaks the HD44780 reference code included with AVR LibC. The other annoyance is the use of parallel resistors of different values to encode the key switches onto a single pin. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time, but the analog values for each keyswitch tend to move around. For less design and coding effort they could have just multiplexed the the keyswitches onto the HD44780 data lines. One last neglected detail was the placement of the select switch between the pin socket and the LCD module. It makes the button difficult to hit sometimes.

Overall you can't beat the price for what you get, although I was a bit surprised to learn how the buttons worked. Each button creates a voltage divider and you are using analog read to determine which button(s) are pressed based on different resistors connected each button (look at the schematic and all is obvious). This is a clever way to save on pins, but you may run into trouble if you were expecting to have buttons generate interrupts as I was. Minor point, but it's laid out in such a way that the headers do not seat fully on an Adruino UNO, there is mech. interference with the boards USB connector (maybe barrel connector too). It functions, but it could have been done nicer, maybe V3? Third time's the charm? Would have been nice if there were jumpers so the buttons could be wired to individual pins. Would have also preferred the LCD come unsoldered in case you wanted to add header connectors there as well.

If you dig in, it's clearly documented, but in a rush it isn't so obvious what you are signing up for. For the money, it's a good buy, with some more effort, it could be great.....

my $0.02

This was my first experience soldering headers into place and while I'm quite sure I would flunk inspection for the next Space-X launch, it works and all buttons map out OK. Chris was helpful as always. I used the Arduino as an alignment guide which proved interesting trying to get the first 8 pins ( 2 on each header) soldered in between the two shields. Should I have placed the IMU shield on top of the LCD instead of the other way around? Oh Well it worked.

I haven't incorporated the push button functionality into a sketch yet as I've only used it as a display for an Arduino IMU shield project and haven't figured out the IMU sketch mods yet.

I like the clean installation. Only had to bend out two pins and install two wire jumpers to deal with pin conflicts with the Arduino shield.

Looking forward to exploring more functionality of the push buttons once I get up to speed with the programming.

The first one has been working great! Take care with your soldering!