Here’s a design for a little 8-bit “Expander Plug”, based on I2C:

This uses the PCA9674 expander chip (PCA8574 would also work).

The connector on the left plugs into a port. The one on the right is wired-through to allow daisy-chaining a few of these plugs (or other I2C plugs). There are solder pads to assign one of four I2C address ranges to each plug.

The I/O lines are brought out on a 2×5-pin male header, including ground and optional PWR. This can be used with a standard 10-wire ribbon cable connector, though I’d place the plug near where it is needed and use a 6-wire connector between the JeeNode port and this plug in most cases.

This plug can also be used to attach a standard LCD module. There’s even a spare pin which could be used to drive the backlight on and off through a transistor. This plug will require a small change to the Arduino’s LiquidCrystal library to re-route the I/O through I2C.

It’s a tight fit, I’ll probably make the plug slightly wider. The added benefit is that it can then no longer be plugged into two ports by accident. I’m still undecided on the 2×5 header, but haven’t been able to come up with a more convenient choice. Suggestions?

As bonus, here’s a trivial plug with two LEDs and two push buttons:

By switching I/O pin directions briefly we can read out both button states, so this trick allows using a single port as 2 inputs plus 2 outputs.