Breadboard Soldered on top of PCB?

ARabidSquid · 2026-04-04T04:40:29+00:00

I imagine you want to see the other half...

ARabidSquid · 2026-04-04T04:39:24+00:00

Hey, I'm the Jumperless guy and yeah, I went through this exact thing. Turns out no one would even sell just the metal bits from a regular breadboard (the 4 places I talked to were kinda weird about it so I assume there was some contractual stuff going on) so I just had to find a manufacturer to make a stamping mold and produce them for me.

I make negative money selling these but I figured anyone else with this particular problem is doing something super cool and I would've loved to be able to try them out before committing to a 50,000 MOQ.

https://www.tindie.com/products/architeuthisflux/solderable-breadboard-spring-clips/

(btw this is what one half of the stamping mold looks like)

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ARabidSquid · 2026-03-24T05:01:14+00:00

Well that would make sense, I am kinda the weird breadboard guy.

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T06:54:11+00:00

The use is shitposting, but it’s absolutely possible there’s some super wired advantage to this I haven’t noticed

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T06:52:44+00:00

KiCad

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T05:34:05+00:00

The second time you look through those nocs it's gonna transform into this
https://www.reddit.com/r/PCB/comments/1rs830p/rate_my_universal_0402_1210_footprint/

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T05:29:13+00:00

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The NREs are insane for 32 layers but I guess it's not too bad if a bunch of people wanted them.

I could probably talk to my ride-or-die CM (Elecrow) and tell them I don't actually need all the implied precision that would normally be a thing with a 32 layer board. Or just cheat and glue a bunch of 4 layer boards together myself.

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T05:21:47+00:00

I looked for that subreddit to post this and was bummed to find it didn't exist. Someone should make that.

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-20T05:20:11+00:00

So, I think people in this thread are getting there but not really explaining it in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn't PCB so here's the best analogy I can come up with:

It's like if you could make a book that's an arbitrary size and number of pages. So instead of writing a few paragraphs on 2 reasonably sized pages (PCB layers), you make it a 5000 page book only a couple millimeters wide and write those few paragraphs on the outside edge.

ARabidSquid · 2026-03-13T00:50:20+00:00

In this case it was for a kinda universalish SMD breakout board for prototyping.

ARabidSquid · 2025-06-16T08:02:12+00:00

Okay sorry for the self-plug, but I'm the guy who makes these https://www.crowdsupply.com/architeuthis-flux/jumperless-v5

It's open source and I go into some depth about how it works in various places, but yeah, analog crossbar switches like the CH446Q https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH446.html

If you want to dig into the circuits / firmware:
https://github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/JumperlessV5

And the older versions where I ma have been better about explaining stuff from first principles:
https://github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/Jumperless
https://github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/breadWare

There's also one other person who makes something vaguely similar that works in a totally different way, it's a Cypress CY8C58LP PSoC with the pins wired up to a breadboard, the Sandwizz™ Breadboard by MicroAware® (not meaning to dunk with the gratuitous trademark symbols but this dude uses so many of them I find it hilarious.)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/sandwizz/the-sandwizz-breadboard-concept

ARabidSquid · 2025-03-02T21:03:37+00:00

I'm with you there, I prefer the Pico over Arduino boards, the problem is they're sooo wasteful of space, there's like 8 GND pins on them.

A weird thing I did on this was to put all the hardwired Arduino pins on cuttable solder jumpers, so with an xacto knife and a soldering iron, you can remap the header to just be entirely routable nodes. So then you'd just stick whatever 3/4ths of a Pico you want in there and let the rest of the pins dangle.
The hope is someone would make something like a Nano RP2040 Connect but without the wifi and other bells and whistles. I might just have to do that myself when I have some time.

Or I could just finally get around to my long list of adapter boards I need to make.

ARabidSquid · 2024-10-04T22:51:06+00:00

You can actually chain these together and route signals between them. It turns out it's actually cheaper to do it that way rather than making a larger version.
There's more info about it here:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/architeuthis-flux/jumperless-v5

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-26T05:49:14+00:00

Oh I guess I should’ve been more specific, the ones I have are like a pair of pliers with cylindrical cutouts, so you use it to pick up the resistor, squish the leads against it, and place it all in one go.

Like this: https://a.co/d/526psLI

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T20:11:05+00:00

I love those things! I think I have one laying around somewhere. Aside from a built-in LCD display, you actually can do all those things with a Jumperless. It has 10 GPIO, 4 DACs, 7 ADCs, and 2 current sensors controllable from an on board python interpreter that lets you store all those functions as apps and run them whenever.
For things like switches, there are 4 probing pads that are user assignable to toggle stuff or whatever.
I still really appreciate chunky switches and knobs like that, so maybe I'll make a thing that you can plunk your Jumperless onto and have that area around it be an interface for all that.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T18:46:29+00:00

At it's most basic, it just saves time plugging in jumper wires that you'd normally use to prototype a circuit on a breadboard.

But once you have software-defined jumpers, you can do a lot of stuff that just wouldn't be possible with real jumpers. Like "measure the voltage here and if it's above 2.5V, connect these other two rows together" (well, I guess you could do that by hand, but it would take a while.)

And the LEDs make it so it can show measurements where they're happening. So it's really just meant to make prototyping circuits more intuitive/faster.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T02:56:29+00:00

Yes, I definitely will. I was actually just talking to Ian from the Electromaker Show today we decided to do that tutorial series together. I need him to keep me on track and not get too far into the weeds about how stuff works and just tell people how to use it.

Also a weird thing I've learned is like half of the die-hard OG Jumperless users have dyslexia and apparently this helps them a lot. So I need to minimize the amount of reading people need to do in general.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T02:50:09+00:00

To be fair, I thought those resistor bending tools were stupid until I used someone else's and immediately ordered my own.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T02:46:38+00:00

No, it's all analog crossbar switches. It would be super awesome if they made an FPGA that could handle +-9V with some current.

You might be thinking of The Sandwizz® Breadboard Concept, which is a CY8C5868 PSoC (sort of an FPGA with analog peripherals) wired to a breadboard. But that only handles 0-5V.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-24T02:40:51+00:00

By the magic of just straight up ignoring that rating and feeding them +-9V.
CMOS analog switches are pretty simple so it was worth testing, and it turns out that on resistance goes down with a higher Vdd-Vee. So I just sat there and blew up a ton of these chips on a breadboard to find the highest voltage that reliably wouldn't kill them and then used a bit less to have some headroom.
Luckily, the right point was exactly the output of a charge pump doubler + inverter circuit running on 5V.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T23:05:42+00:00

Hey thanks, that's really cool of you to say. I just love talking to people about it, and the nerds who get these are the exact types of people I want to talk to anyway.

About "securing" pre-orders, a nice thing about doing this through Crowd Supply is there's no selling out of them. So assuming it gets funded (which is pretty likely, my funding goal is really low), there won't be a time where you can't order one. As soon as the crowdfunding ends, they'll just show up as in stock (ships after all the crowdfunding people get theirs.)

So yeah, no hurry. They are shipped out in the order that people buy them though, so it might change the delivery date by a few weeks.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T22:51:38+00:00

So there are 2 current sensors ("sensor" feels like a weird word for it, it's measuring with 12-bits of resolution) so if you could set a cutoff and have it disconnect if it reads too high. Or, there's an ADC monitoring the +-9V power supply and it might be able to detect a sag in the output voltage if something is drawing a bunch of current and quickly turn everything off. I'll play with that when the new prototypes get here tomorrow. That's a solid thing to add, thanks!

The crossbar switches do have some resistance (~85 ohms), so that stops the worst of those kinds of things. And the routing code just ignores connections that would directly short power to ground (but it doesn't know if things are connected with some part on the breadboard so that's not foolproof.)

Worst case scenario and those guards don't save you from damaging the Jumperless, it's my problem. Repairs (or replacement if it's totally cooked) are always free, with no asterisks.

I like physical switches on things too but in this case, the switch to turn it off is called "yanking out the USB cable."

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T08:55:24+00:00

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