solarbird | I made a thing ^_^ (powered breadboard)

I made a thing! It’s a powered breadboard. Breadboards are experimental tools, to let you build test circuits. You can get really over the top with them – there’s a youtuber who built a simple CPU out of discreet components on breadboards and last I saw was still expanding its capabilities. But for me it’s more a learning tool.

You can buy them on eBay and Amazon but since I had a lot of parts already I built my own and it was in fact cheaper than buying one! Take that, economies of scale!

It has three power supply voltages and they’re adjustable. The copper-coloured brick and the colour coded frames is 3D printed, the voltage displays are accurate/realtime (and cheap, five for like $8, bought for this), the voltages are adjusted using buck converters (similarly cheap, already on hand), and the power supply brick was from an old Toshiba laptop. It natively supplies something like 16.3V DC – more than the 15V which is common and even then more than I’ll need for this. And since it’s meant to drive a laptop, it has lots of overhead, so everybody wins.

And this is the entire workboard! The black board is painted scrap from a broken-down chest of drawers, pretty much the last piece I have from that. I think it’s from the 1940s but could’ve well been the 1950s. Either way, it’s some old lumber. xD The white boards are experimenter’s boards, you can plug standard through-hole components into them and make circuits; the lines of holes marked + and – are connected through the whole line, the ones labelled with alphabet letters are connected in groups of five, aligned with the numbers on the sides.

Oh yeah, the board wanted to warp a bit so it has smoothed aluminium L-metal left over from another project on the underside for flatness and that sorted that out just fine.

The only thing I’d really do differently I think is measure the board for actual squareness. It’s not quite square and fortunately since I painted it black it’s not as big a deal, but it still bugs me just a little. xD

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.