The Toastboard

Abstract

The recent proliferation of easy to use electronic components and toolkits has introduced a large number of novices to designing and building electronic projects. Nevertheless, debugging circuits remains a difficult and time-consuming task. This paper presents a novel debugging tool for electronic design projects, the Toastboard, that aims to reduce debugging time by improving upon the standard paradigm of point-wise circuit measurements. Ubiquitous instrumentation allows for immediate visualization of an entire breadboard's state, meaning users can diagnose problems based on a wealth of data instead of having to form a single hypothesis and plan before taking a measurement. Basic connectivity information is displayed visually on the circuit itself and quantitative data is displayed on the accompanying web interface. Software-based testing functions further lower the expertise threshold for efficient debugging by diagnosing classes of circuit errors automatically. In an informal study, participants found the detailed, pervasive, and context-rich data from our tool helpful and potentially time-saving.

A Survey and Taxonomy of Electronics Toolkits for Interactive and Ubiquitous Device Prototyping

“…In an effort to facilitate Type 1 electronics prototyping, product designers and researchers have built various tools. These either provide novel ways for connecting discrete components together, for example Snap Circuits [115], or they help novice engineers detect and diagnose problems [40]. In recent years there is also an increased interest in using novel fabrication technologies to interconnect discrete electronic components.…”

Heimdall

“…A key direction has been to develop augmented solderless breadboards, as many students start building circuits on breadboards. Augmented breadboards can measure and visualize voltages on each row [10], current flow [30], and can partially detect what components have been inserted through active probing [31]. Finally, many student projects in embedded and physical computing live at the intersection between software and hardware.…”

“…We focus on the setting of debugging breadboarded circuits, since the solderless breadboard is a ubiquitous substrate for quickly prototyping electronic devices. Recently, the HCI research community has introduced several "smart" breadboards that deliver additional functionality to aid debugging, such as voltage sensing [10], current visualization [30] and automatic component detection [31]. These are aimed at users who have physical access to the circuit in question.…”

Beyond Schematic Capture

“…A key research direction has been to develop augmented breadboards, as many students start building circuits on breadboards. These include measuring and visualizing voltages [12] and current flows [39], and detection of inserted components through active probing [40]. Bifröst [24] further combines code instrumentation and logic analyzer circuit tracing for examining the hardware-software boundary.…”