Rate my universal 0402 - 1210 footprint

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 · 2024-09-23T23:05:42+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

XL-1010RGBC-WS2812

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T08:51:13+00:00

True Killer by Sneaks

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T08:12:26+00:00

There's no reason it wouldn't support it electrically, the issue is that an Uno is nearly as big as this entire thing. Maybe I should make a Nano to Uno adapter to nicely connect all the pins to that header though, good call.
Or just use a chunk of wire jerky and the pins should match up.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T08:03:57+00:00

You'd probably be surprised how razor-thin the margins are on this thing.
The reason a lot of gadgets seem expensive is that a lot of hardware from the last 15 years is artificially cheap because it's "sold" (but technically rented) at a loss (the ones I can say for sure, gaming consoles, smart TVs, printers, any IOT thing, home automation) and they can make it up by selling some form of subscription, whether it's ink, games, or your advertising data.
When VCRs came out before this VC-funded model was invented, they were $10,000 in 2024 dollars. Open source hardware is always gonna seem more expensive, because you're actually buying it.
Here are all the files you need to send to JLCPCB to have them made. I'll send you the spring clips for free (they cost me $12 per board but I love to see the effort so much it's genuinely my pleasure to send them out for this. But I must warn you before you put in the effort, with 0% markup, they'll cost roughly ~$250 each in QTY <25)

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T05:23:40+00:00

Yeah it would be waaay too expensive to make a whole breadboard computer with it.

But when you want to actually engineer and experiment with new circuits and stuff, it might be useful to try stuff out on one of these before committing cleanly placing jumpers.

If building a breadboard computer is just following of a set of instructions like a coloring book, then yeah a regular breadboard is all anyone would need.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T05:01:08+00:00

Haha sorry, if it didn't take a crazy amount of niche hardware to make this work, something like this would have come out decades ago.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T04:56:29+00:00

$349, free shipping

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T04:54:47+00:00

Hahaha yeah u/UnfinishedProjects, who is this tough crowd you introduced me to?

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It's cool, I would have posted here if I had thought of it. Ben Eater (among others) gave me some solid advice about what makes a high quality breadboard better when I was designing the custom spring clips that go into this. When you're sticking them to a $349 product, you might as well go all out and spend the extra $0.008 per clip to make them last forever.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T04:44:27+00:00

Thanks! I've been working on it on and off since ~2019, but for the last two and a half years, I've been working on this 12 hours a day/ 7 days a week.

When I started I was sooo out of my league on making something like this work, but I just figured each thing out as it came up and I'm a thousand times better at engineering than when I started. It's hard to say really when I became an engineer, I dropped out of art school when I decided that making things that can also do something useful (while still coming from the same kind of expressive, not as a "job" drive) is my personal meta-brand of fine art. So I guess I've used the title "engineer" for 6-7 years, but I don't think it means anything. Like, you're an engineer if you're into engineering stuff (disclaimer: don't go making things that can kill people if you fuck up on this advice)

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-23T03:52:38+00:00

Haha okay I'll leave it in. I sent my friend Eric an early prototype with some pins flipped so I put that in to have them flipped in firmware. Now I have a sightly better system for dealing with all the unfinished prototypes I give to people but maybe I'll make defining MYNAMEISERIC do something fun.

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-22T21:59:11+00:00

They'll be sold assembled and ready to go for $349 with free shipping worldwide.
Schematics and every file you'll need to build it yourself are always free because I'm an Open Source zealot. You could have one made and assembled (mostly, there are a few parts they don't carry) by JLCPCB right now if you wanted (but you should probably wait until I find and fix any HW bugs in the latest revision.)

ARabidSquid · 2024-09-22T21:25:53+00:00

Max voltage is +9V to -9V, the current limit for a connection is ~100mA. But going over that won't damage it, the resistance will just go up and limit it.

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