[HH] BiscuitBoard

[Tom Metro]

A Japanese research team was exploring how to make a typical solderless
breadboard thinner (you know, the white plastic blocks full of holes,
that are about 1/4" thick), and they kept running into the problem that
if you stuck a component with a large diameter lead into a hole, the
spring might get permanently deformed (also a problem for traditional
solderless breadboards, especially cheap ones). Then they thought, what
if they could make the boards cheap enough so that they could be
considered one-time use. In the same way that soldered perf or proto
board gets "consumed" by the project you use it on.

Their solution is the BiscuitBoard, which from the top surface looks
like a tan PCB, much like a soldered perf board. Except the bottom side
looks the same as the top - no copper pads. The side view shows that it
is about 2 or 3 times the thickness of typical PCB material. Hidden
inside are the spring contacts that make it solderless.

You push components into the holes, which go through both sides of the
board, and then you trim off the excess leads on the bottom. Exact same
thing you'd do with a soldered perf board, just no soldering.

The idea here is that these would bridge the gap between a solderless
breadboard (used for your initial prototype) and a soldered perf board,
being particularly appealing to novice builders who aren't comfortable
with soldering.

Knowing that the components will be installed in a more permanent
fashion on these boards, they upped the spring tension, so they claim
significantly greater force is required to pull out wires compared to a
solderless breadboard.

As an added bonus, the 4 corner mounting holes are sized to fit LEGO
posts. The kit comes with some cylindrical LEGO parts that can be used
as standoffs and to stack multiple boards.

They're running a Kickstarter for this:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/252587878/biscuit-board-solderless-prototyping-board

The first tier is 2 sets of boards, the LEGO standoffs, and free
shipping for $28. You can get a (half-length, which is what these
compare to) solderless breadboard for about $4 each, so they'll need to
get close to that. Even though they aren't reusable, I could see someone
paying $5 for one to gain the more finished appearance, vibration
resistant connections, and thinner profile. But much more than that, and
they'll be too costly.

 -Tom