I don't have any experience using the wireless SD shield, but after looking at it, I see what you are saying. It forces the connection on 0 and 1 and then has a

I don't have any experience using the wireless SD shield, but after looking at it, I see what you are saying. It forces the connection on 0 and 1 and then has a switch to use when you need to program it? That seems like a silly limitation of the wireless SD shield. I use the Adafruit breakout boards for my Xbee's or wireless modules. You should still be able to use software serial to setup a debugging serial environment, so you can use Serial.print() etc. Here are some references: SoftwareSerial- http://arduino.cc/hu/Reference/SoftwareSerial http://arduino.cc/hu/Reference/SoftwareSerial Wifly Tester- http://arduinology.tumblr.com/WiFly http://arduinology.tumblr.com/WiFly