Jumperless: Breadboard Without Jumper | Hacker News Reader

Jumperless: Breadboard Without Jumper

hackaday.io

199 pointsmeatjuice62 comments

Two years ago this is where the project was, this seems to be a substantial step in the right direction.

https://hackaday.com/2021/06/23/silicon-jumpers-make-this-wi...

I'm definitely going to have a look at this, it's a bit like an FPGA meets breadboard and that's a nice middle ground for being able to connect all kinds of stuff in a structured manner without breaking out the soldering iron until it is absolutely necessary. If they can be manufactured cheap enough you could even use them as a temporary stand-in for a PCB until you're 100% sure of what you plan to do, even in small series with very rapid turnaround and the ability to fix things on the fly if necessary. Lovely work this, amazing progress and stamina to stick with it.

I was thinking in some respects it seems a bit like an FPAA. Just been looking at https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/FPAA_IEEEXPlore_2020.pdf.

Neat. I wonder how easy it would be to 'gang' these to make larger breadboards. I've used the regular ones for designs with 10's of chips and it can get pretty crowded with all of the wiring especially for buses and clock nets. A couple of these would make things far more organized.

That’s a good idea! In fact, it’s been requested a few times so I think Rev 4 will have card-edge connectors to do thar

Do you have a tracking bug for this? I could see PCIe pcb edge on the top and left with female straddle mount recepticles on the bottom and right. Another option would be something like pmod, fewer pins available but cheap and easy.

Not yet, but feel free to open one here: https://github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/Jumperless/issues

It would be nice to hear a bunch of ideas about it, because at this point I haven't given it too much thought.

My thinking is to use something like this, maybe with a separate tiny PCB to connect between both boards because I don't want to mess up the general outline of the board.

The best possible version of this that I can imagine would allow for two boards to mate in all possible directions, you might want to go with a 'slave' expansion board that ties on to the first module in E/S/W but not N, another alternative would be to physically connect them to each other resulting in immediate connections between all boards. Lots of possibilities here. Something like i^c might help connecting the boards on a very cheap bus to allow for the configuration and read-out of slave boards, higher speed interaction would require a free set of 'edges' that can be connected between adjacent boards.

Cool, do keep me posted please, email in profile. Very nice project!

Thanks for sharing!

As a side: I like how the OP post is tagged as “Not an FPGA” on hackaday

If I understand how it works correctly, this is much more than a breadboard for the 'lazy' who don't want to physically connect contect points. Since everything is switchable at high speed, you could for example create a clock signal on all clock inputs and then dynamically connect hi/lo voltages and inputs and outputs. You could for example physically have 3 clocked NAND gates and use them as a series of hundreds of NAND gates? Simulate an FPGA?

Exactly what I was thinking. It is very cool.

It would be the perfect thing to demonstrate what an FPGA does.

> USB Mini is pretty uncommon nowadays, even though it's the best USB port ever made, and I refuse to change my mind on that.

Uh, okay. At least they did it on purpose.

It's not the first time I've seen this opinion shared among the 'maker' crowd. I'm still not really sure why, but between type B which is very large and micro, which is fragile and awful, it was a good middle ground. The lack of adoption is probably the biggest pain point for usb mini, that and type c is now available, though type c has its own pain points.

Maybe it's just easy to work with? I know for quite a while a lot of ergonomic keyboard designs featured mini usb as well.

USB Mini also had a design flaw which caused the port to wear out prematurely (after only about 1,000 insertions), which was why the industry transitioned to USB Micro so quickly (which is rated for about 10,000 insertions).

https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-wa...

According to the link, the 1000 number is related to the initial USB mini design with flat sides. It got changed to the kinked sides which we all know and which has... 5000 insertions. Still not a lot, so the argument is the same.

I've snapped more micro-usb connectors than any other type that I can think of, which might be why i view them as not being very durable, but I've also used quite a few more devices that use micro-usb than mini, so it's not exactly a fair comparison.

In either case, USB type C seems to be mostly better than either.

The main thing is that without any strain relief like on a bare PCB like this, USB mini seems to hold up better for almost psychological reasons. The shape makes you tend to plug it in straight and put less pressure at an up/down angle.

I actually love USB-C for similar reasons, but sending USB 2.0 signals and power over USB-C feels weirdly misleading and janky nowadays.

That being said, I’m literally the guy whose semi-fringe opinions about USB ports you’re discussing, so I have a clear bias.

Having a wired connection to a wireless breadboard seems inconsistent.

In for the penny in for the pound:

Drum power connection + Bluetooth connectivity only!

> Maybe it's just easy to work with?

Yeah, that's my impression anyway. The Mini connector is a comfortable size to work with, particularly considering DIY electronics at home was usually a through-hole affair a decade or so ago. Type B is large enough to get in the way (although it being so chonky is rather satisfying) and micro wasn't significantly smaller in general terms but was fiddly for soldering or probing etc. I'm not sure if USB Micro connectors were even generally available as through-hole?

Appendage:

> for quite a while a lot of ergonomic keyboard designs featured mini usb as well.

Thinking about it, a lot of them probably used off the shelf Arduino Nano(?) based boards, which most commonly featured the USB Mini connector.

Also, I like that I can clearly see which way it's supposed to plug in.

And if there's a genuine Arduino Nano on the top headers, it's kinda weird to have 2 different ports on the same board. Obviously there are tons of compatible boards with different plugs.

That being said, these are just excuses to back up my emotional decision. I just really like USB Mini.

And I know most people don't have USB Mini cables laying around so I provide a hand painted and glittered pink cable with these.

Thomas Edison also electrocuted an elephant on purpose, but it remains a bad idea.

Edison did nothing wrong. The elephant was charging.

Finally someone made this! I’ve been waiting for a crosspoint switch based breadboard since I first found out about crosspoint switches.

Unfortunately this looks like it uses some rather limited parts probably for cost reason so the switches only support +-8v at 1MHz. Even a decade ago the SOTA was over a GHz with a much wider voltage range ($$$$$$).

Yeah, selling for $289. I’m guessing these aren’t cheap to make. At least $30 BOM, but since it’s small batch, might have even made the mistake of letting the BOM get up to $100.

I’m not sure who the taget audience is. I want to impulse buy, but I’m not convinced yet that it would improve my workflow. The video shows a rats nest, but the first rule of breadboarding is to use wires that make it easy to trace. Worse, is now there’s one more layer to debug. My suspicion is that this is a tool that will be solid in a few iterations, and will eliminate many of the headaches breadboards add not mentioned in the video, namely parasitic capacitance and inductance.

I am interested in what I could do with the thing based on the last part of the video though. Being able to trivially reroute signals in realtume could open up a lot of possibilities.

This is a super-neat design, and I'm glad someone has made it. But I would never buy it, in part because of the cost.

It is really neat though.

You need to tinker often for it to be useful. I find less and less usage for the breadboards when you can simulate most of the things in software and then put it on the prototype board in a neat package

Which simulation software would you recommend?

I actually love using Falstad, it's fairly simple which is great because usually I just want to look at the ideal behavior of things to get the circuit working before I worry about the exact characteristics of every part.

This link will take you to that crosspoint switch demo. https://tinyurl.com/yr34sym6

https://wokwi.com/ is great for simple, digital only stuff.

https://fritzing.org/ will kind of lay out the PCB for you, but it's kind of a pain in the ass.

Wokwi and Fritzing are more "Breadboard Simulators" than real circuit simulators, but they do have their place.

I don't have a simulation software recommendation, though /u/type0 might.

I would recommend just using an "expensive" prototype board, that costs maybe $20 USD, instead of over that costs $4. There are different levels of quality with regard to the little clips that grip the wires and components.

The wires are really the least problem in experimenting with electronics.

Their specs list the switches as being -3dB at 50MHz, so I would probably expect them to pass almost anything that I would ever consider building on a breadboard; where did you get the lower ratings? I think that the +/- 8V is just the tolerance for the onboard microcontroller.

In this video[1] he mentions +- 9V tolerance of the switches: “each connection can pass plus minus nine volts at fifty megahertz and are tested up to a hundred milliamps”

[1] https://youtu.be/_k0aKM68Xl4?si=xjVgkdbT7TK3dkTD

Crosspoint switches today, even expensive ones, still have a problem with impedance. They might not be as slow as 50 MHz, but the 65 ohm impedance is a killer for quite a few circuits, and the high tens-of-ohm impedance isn't uncommon.

I don't get these comments. On the one hand 'Finally someone made this!' followed by a bunch of complaints about the limitations. If finally someone has made this and there are some limitations isn't that normal for anything new? Can you improve on it? If so then please do so!

Many many people can celebrate something even while acknowledging its shortcomings and don’t find any insult when that’s done.

It’s a cultural thing maybe, but for those of us, it’s easier to let ourselves do so than artificially act like something must either be perfect or trash.

We can just say “Oh, this is that. I like this part but not that part. Cool!” and feel like we put it all out there.

Fun fact, the first popular modern breadboards with power supplies and switches and stuff we use today were $1,300 in 1974 dollars, so ~$9,855 today accounting for inflation.

Also, I’m the guy who made this and you’re absolutely spot on. I’m constantly working on making this better and cheaper as time goes on. It’s totally open source so I hope people will write firmware to do the things they want with it and share it with others who want to do that thing as well.

I've been watching your project from inception and I think you're on to something, keep doing this and you'll definitely go places. Also: I'd suggest contacting the Adafruit people, they're right in your sweet spot and may have both good product ideas around what you're doing and a massive audience and market. On top of that they're nice.

Hey thanks! Yeah this blew up really quickly, I have a batch of 50 coming which at the time seemed like a lot, now I have 500 preorders from this week. So yeah that's a great tip if I ever plan on improving the actual project instead of packing boxes all day forever. I'll do that.

We are debuggers by nature. It's a (bad) force of habit.

This would be really useful for doing automated testing of embedded devices.

I hope it succeeds!

Nice, it's like Excel for hardware :D

Please don’t build the entire basis for modern society on a Jumperless, that’s way too much pressure.

Don’t worry, we’ll start with that, and we’ll replace it when we have the means to do so.

I think you would also have to route the signals through a PGA network first.

We just need a Jumperless Excel Add-In that's all.

What are the voltage and frequency range of the crossbar?

"-8V to +8V, up to around 1 MHz before signal quality starts to degrade"

OK. That's good enough for audio and for analog control systems.

He comments to wait for the next release for audio applications.

That revision actually came out a month ago and I forgot to update the details. Thanks for pointing that out!

Here's the video for anyone interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k0aKM68Xl4

without jumper..? I'm confused, how's this different from a normal breadboard? And what's being shown in the gallery?

In a normal breadboard, you dynamically link different rows with physical jumper cables. The linked breadboard allows you to dymamically connect rows using software.

Oh, that's really neat! I was confused by all the microcontroller-esque things being shown, I couldn't tell what was the actual product or not, couldn't find an actual description of its functionality. Needs a README imho.

> Needs a README imho

Is the “Description” section at the top not sufficient?

“Description

Using a bunch of analog crosspoint switches wired together into one bigger switch, Jumperless makes real, fully analog hardware connections between any points on the board or the Arduino Nano header at the top via serial, instead of needing to use jumper wires.”

Admittedly, the HackADay layout is pretty atrocious, and at east on an iPhone, the description is several pages down, after the picture gallery and a bunch of empty white space. Nonetheless, the “description” section is at the very top of the main textual content of the page.

Not much the project creator can do to fix HackADay’s bad layout, sadly.

I couldn't find it. :/

+1 the mobile layout has you believe you’ve gotten to the end of the page by showing “Related projects” so you don’t scroll further. Description should be below photos or even title.

I couldn’t find it either! I just looked at the photos and came back to HN (having to go way back in my history because the annoying photo viewer floods the back button).

https://github.com/Architeuthis-Flux/Jumperless

I find that GitHub looks way nicer than Hackaday on mobile.

https://www.tindie.com/products/architeuthisflux/jumperless/

It is similar in principle to Matrix mixer from Erica Synths, they need to make it battery driven in the form of Volca and it would be an awesome thing to connect a couple of Volca Modular, AE Modular synths, Bastl Kastle etc

I was also confused by the gallery at the top. You have to scroll for a while to get to a description and video (on mobile anyway)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com