3D Printed Breadboard

thingiverse

This work in progress has been a long term goal of mine, at least since I got involved with 3D printing about a year and a half ago. The recent release of electrically conductive filament has made it possible to create some amazing circuitry designs. What I have done is design a breadboard with a 3D printed conductive node. We know that we can print the nonconductive part of a breadboard, but it's the electrical grabbers underneath that grab the wires which have been hard to replace. This morning (July 11, 2015) I realized that a simple wedge shape could replace the grabbers! So I made a quick OpenSCAD model of a wedge that would fit and got some okay results. Each resistor had a 500 Ohm resistance to a central low resistance node - makes sense, I guess. Then I printed a second wedge that fit better and was thinner and got very low resistance for the node for some unknown reason. Later this node opened up though, so I think it was loose. In fact, I think what is needed is not the friction fit that the wedge alone provides; rather we should put some simple spring-loaded mechanism in the print of the breadboard itself to hold the sides of the wires against the conductive wedge or rectangle. Well, this is an open source community and this is a well-wanted item so I figure someone if not me will figure out something that works as well as this only better. p.s. see the following link for a full working breadboard! https://www.youmagine.com/designs/electronics-breadboard