Electronics Breadboard

youmagine

I've spent my entire adult life working with breadboards, a whopping 30 years now, and when I got into 3D printing I dreamed of one day soon making my own breadboards. I envisioned that with 3D printing's incredible ability to create any shape we could make breadboards of almost any design. Well, in just the past 24 hours, I finally made it happen! Right now, the fit is a bit loose so I used tape to secure the Proto-pasta conductive inserts (grabbers) in place, although with a bit more tweaking that shouldn't be necessary. I attempted to use a small sample of BlackMagic3D graphene filament for the grabbers but ran into issues that prevented me from using it. The key to making it possible to print the grabbers with today's technology is to use every other horizontal hole position as extra space for the grabbers, and to rearrange the grabbers rotated by 90 degrees. With this approach, the breadboard becomes about twice as wide (horizontally) and remains the same length (vertically). Check out the STL images to get a better grasp of what I mean! I still need to measure the node resistance, and this sort of project is rich with potential for exploration so I used wiki mode so you can modify the description and files with improvements. Even if the node resistance is a bit large, more conductive and stronger filaments are coming out now, and with care and an appropriately set up printer you can print with filament thirty times more conductive than the Proto-pasta filament I used, giving you plenty of options. I chose Proto-pasta because it was the quickest path to getting the job done. Next up: more breadboards! We can YouMagine all sorts of breadboard arrangements together - Arduino vehicles and robots with electronicized structure, back-to-back breadboards, breadboards wrapped around a sphere or company logo, and so on. Have fun! By the way, I've measured the node resistance at 3 kOhms, which can be improved significantly with design to probably 1k, then using graphene filament we get it down to 30 to 50 Ohms or so. Graphene is tough to print though, so it ultimately depends on your requirements.