I Got the Hook-Up

Let’s be honest — not every hobby project we build is carefully laid out in electronic design automation software before we start putting the pieces together. Perfecting the design first may be the right way to do things, but after doing things the right way at work all week, a person just needs to cut loose and be creative on the weekends. For these types of projects, having a rough sketch of the design in mind is enough to start warming up the soldering iron.

Prototypes are very fluid, with connections and components being swapped out as fast as a multimeter or logic analyzer can signal that something isn’t working quite right. So before laying anything down on a PCB, it is important to have a good-sized stack of breadboards, jumper wires, and supporting components within reach. That will greatly help to speed up the process of iterating through designs.

Even still, certain tasks are very repetitive and time-consuming. Interfacing external devices with a custom circuit, for example, can take a lot of wiring (and a lot of debugging!) to get right, and most electronics projects require many separate systems to be interfaced with one another. Rodrigo Feliciano does a lot of prototyping, and came up with a solution called ProtoConn that makes this common chore a whole lot easier. ProtoConn has a large grid of through-hole copper pads for designing arbitrary circuits, along with a huge variety of connectors, buttons, knobs, and I/O options to get a project off the ground quickly.

ProtoConn is so loaded down with connectors that it might actually be easier to list the things it does not have, but I will give it a try anyway. The 200 x 195 mm dual layer PCB comes loaded with a DE-9 Connector, RCA Connectors, screw terminals, barrel connectors, a potentiometer, a 40-pin I/O connector (for Raspberry Pi single-board computers), JTAG and SWD connectors, a 4-pin programming connector for STM32 chips, a USB-to-serial connector, spaces for a variety of microcontrollers and Arduino shields, LEDs, a 12-key matrix keypad, USB ports, and a ground pad. Whew! I need to take a breath! The only thing that does not seem to be on the list is the kitchen sink.

The KiCad design files (some formal design had to work its way in!) are available on GitHub under a permissive license. Go get ‘em and start creating!