[HH] BiscuitBoard

[Kurt L Keville]

This is quite interesting... especially the cheap enough to be disposable part...

-----Original Message-----
From: hardwarehacking-bounces+kkeville=mit.edu at blu.org [mailto:hardwarehacking-bounces+kkeville=mit.edu at blu.org] On Behalf Of Tom Metro
Sent: Sunday, July 27, 2014 4:24 AM
To: hardwarehacking at blu.org
Subject: [HH] BiscuitBoard

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
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