brainwagon

This is just a plug for a cute little pair of gadgets that I got the other day.. If you are like me and use solderless breadboards to experiment with stuff on the Arduino, you end up with the Arduino and the breadboard connected by a hodge podge of wires, and if you accidently tug on a power supply cord or the USB cord, half connections come undone. Or, you do all this experimenting on the dining room table, and when you have to clear it away for dinner, all sorts of wires become undone. Frustrating. Even annoying.

So, I took out an insurance policy against annoyance and frustration and ordered a protyping board for the Arduino Uno from TAUTIC.com. TAUTIC Electronics LLC is one of those cool little bootstrapped companies that have chosen to embrace the Open Source Hardware ideas and offer products of interest to tinkerers like myself. This prototype board is basically just a solderless breadboard bonded to a blue plastic backer, with the holes properly drilled to attach an Arduino Uno and the necessary hardware. He also makes version for the chipKit microcontrollers manufactured by Diligent.

While I placed that order, I decided to also give one of his dual output breadboard power supplies a try. For $9, you get a nice little board that plugs into a prototype board and provides 5V on the top rail, and 3.3V on the bottom rail. Very spiffy. The boards were shipped to me literally on the day I ordered them, great customer service. Jayson has a number of other cool boards, including some thermocouple boards and a PIC based development board. Check his store out and see if there is something that catches your eye.