Go Jumperless with the breadWare Breadboard
"You can connect some of the GPIO pins so you basically have an Arduino Nano Every hidden inside a breadboard."
Breadboarding circuits can be an arduous endeavor, especially when you wind up with a bird’s nest of wires and need to troubleshoot. Gadget builder Kevin Santo Cappuccio has made the process easier with his breadWare prototyping tool that requires no wires but instead makes jumper connections via a microcontroller. The top of the breadWare looks identical to any breadboard, but that’s where the similarities end, as underneath are an MT8816 8x10 analog switch array, which connects to a control board and an ATmega4809 MCU.
The array acts as general-purpose nodes, allowing users to read voltages, connect to the GPIO on the microcontroller and other special functions. “I changed the logical arrangement of the MT8816 crosspoint switches to make it easier to just hop over the middle space,” Cappuccio explains. “In the original layout, if I wanted to connect top row 5 to bottom row 5, it would always take 2 hops to do that (and these switches each have an on-resistance of about 65Ω). Now the bottom rows are flipped so internally the bottom left is 62 and counts down to 33 on the right.” He also added some reverse-mounted LEDs to shine through the top of the breadboard and the bottom of the control board for some extra-added “glam.”
Since everything is analog and the crosspoint switches require a negative power supply, Cappuccio designed an adjustable power supply for the rails that can output the required negative voltages. The power supply does run a little hot, so he does note that it will need to be revised in future revisions.
Cappuccio has uploaded a detailed walkthrough on his project page for those who would like to recreate his build.