These Banana Plug Breakouts Make It Easier to Build Circuits By Touch Alone
Designed for visually impaired students, this prototyping system builds up into even complex circuits.
Pseudonymous maker and educator "hey_hey_you_you," hereafter simply "Hey," is working on a system designed to make it easier for the visually impaired to build their own electronic creations — by making breakout boards a little more tactile.
"I know there are a million electronic toolkits already available that make wiring easier," Hey explains of the project, "but I couldn't find anything that adapted standard components rather than having its own ecosystem of pre-built modules. Grove, STEMMA, Qwiic, Little Bits, etc. are all great, but they abstract the circuit wiring, which makes teaching the basics hard. Snap circuits make connections easy and make the wiring explicit, but they have a really limited set of modules available."
Hey's search for a suitable prototyping system came up short, and there was little desire to single out visually impaired students by making them use different hardware to the rest of the class. So, Hey set about designing their own.
The breakout boards are designed to be modular, accepting through-hole components in a ZIF socket and providing banana plug connections for wiring — easier to insert by feel than 0.1" pin headers and jumper wires, Hey explains. Each board includes Braille labeling for its ground and power connections, plus raised symbols for those who don't know Braille. Three-pin boards add data connections, swapping the ZIF socket for Grove/STEMMA/Qwiic connectors in order to adapt existing breakout boards to the new approach.
Still larger boards accept microcontroller development boards like the BBC micro:bit. "Because banana cables are stackable," Hey notes, "you can wire more than one connection to the pins on the microcontroller." The largest boards, meanwhile, accept integrated circuits — bringing out every pin to a banana plug.
"I intend to use them with all my first year students next year. We always start with crocodile clips rather than breadboards (because breadboards break their brains) but the crocs have an annoying tendency to short when you move the circuit around. This would cut that problem out at least."
The project is documented in Hey's Reddit post.