Sciotronics' Stamp Boards Aim to Take the Pain Out of Surface-Mount Devices
Designed to sit somewhere between breadboarding and custom PCB design, Stamps are more than simple breakout boards.
UK-based startup Sciotronics is looking to make the move from the breadboard to a neater soldered assembly easier with Stamp — a modular range of PCB breakouts for a variety of surface-mount components.
"Have you ever spent more time untangling jumper wires than building your circuit? We certainly have," says Sciotronics' Kalesh Sasidharan of the problem the company set out to solve. "One frustrating weekend, after yet another messy breadboard fail, we asked ourselves: 'Why can't prototyping be as clean and intuitive as plugging in just like toy‑brick–style building blocks?' That question led us to Stamp — a modular PCB 'breadboard' designed for today’s tiny SMD [Surface-Mount Device] components."
The Stamp family, Sasidharan explains, is designed to bridge the gap between prototyping on a solderless breadboard and producing a custom PCB — offering something smaller, neater, and more robust than the breadboard without the wait times and minimum order quantities of commercial PCB production. Each Stamp is designed to mount a particular footprint of surface-mount component, bringing out its pins to castellated headers along each of the 17.8×17.8mm (around 0.7×0.7") square boards' edges.
The front side of a given Stamp holds the surface-mount component, while the back side includes supporting pads that can be routed in particular ways using solder links or, when necessary, other components such as capacitors or resistors. Multiple Stamps can be connected together in a matrix by pushing them together and soldering the desired link pins — with the plating on the castellation stopping shy of the edge to ensure that unsoldered pins don't short together. Stamps can also be connected at right-angles, the company says — showing off an LED cube made using six Stamp boards soldered together.
While Sciotronics is funding mass production of Stamp boards via a crowdfunding campaign, the company has also promised to release the boards KiCad design files under an unspecified "fully open source" license later this year. "We believe in transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement," Sasidharan says. "Your feedback shapes every future Stamp release."
The company's crowdfunding campaign is now live on Kickstarter, with physical rewards starting at £20 (around $27) for two each of 10 board designs in the Stamp Basic style, which lacks castellated pin headers; the Stamp Regular kit features the same designs but with castellated pin headers for £25 (around $33), while the Stamp Pro kit adds floating pads, pads to swap polarity, left-right loop pads, and full back-side pads for all 20-pin components at £31 (around $41). All hardware is expected to ship in September, with "early bird" backers due to receive their boards in July.