A Stack Of Boards For An Edison Breadboard Adapter

The Intel Edison is a neat piece of hardware, but the connector for the Edison is extremely intimidating and the Mini breakout board is incompatible with breadboards. What’s [Federico], a builder of Internet of Things to do? Etch their own breakout board.

The Mini Breakout board for the Intel Edison is the official ‘minimal’ offering for getting the Edison up and running with a mess of jumper wires and LEDs. While this breakout board handles the USB to UART bridge, power regulation, and exposes all the pins on the Edison connector, it is terrible for prototyping. It’s a 4×14 array of holes on a 0.1″ grid that are hidden underneath the Edison.

[Federico] handled this problem with a copper clad board and a little bit of ferric chloride. He jumped into Eagle and created a breakout board to turn the 4×14 pin grid into a more sensible breadboard-friendly layout.

The breadboard-friendly adapter doesn’t have level shifters, but by using the mini-breakout board between the Edison and the breadboard adapter [Federico] still has the UART to USB hardware and a battery charging circuit. Still, there’s room for improvement and we can’t wait to see what he comes up with next.

15 thoughts on “A Stack Of Boards For An Edison Breadboard Adapter

  1. Any board named after “Edison” is crap. I know this because anyone that proclaims him to have been a great man is either an idiot or an asshole pandering to idiots.

    1. The guy was a prolific inventor. Had almost 1100 patents… The businessman part of him was (from what I hear, I wasn’t there) a scumbag. The shit he pulled to take down Tesla was just that. But I think with the shear amount of inventions he had “great” could probably be used to describe him

      1. I don’t really have an opinion one way or the other about Thomas Edison specifically but I wouldn’t measure the greatness of an inventor by the number of patents. Nor would I even use it to infer a number of unique inventions. I don’t have that kind of confidence in the patent office.

        Are they things that were not patented previously because a sane person would just assume they are obvious? Are they “..with a..” type patents. Obviously he couldn’t patent “with a computer…” perhaps “… with electricity”? Are they stolen ideas?

        Unless you can also give citations as to the patent system being a whole lot better back then than it is now. If anything I expect a large number of patents to imply a whole lot of business “scumbaggery” and not much else.

  2. Ummm… Can someone tell me where I can find a breadboard that wide? Wouldn’t it be ‘friendlier’ if it mounted the Edison on its side, and spaced the rows of pins as closely together as possible? What am I missing, here?

    1. with this you use two breadboards adjacent to each other. not the most convenient layout, but more easily done than a narrower layout. witness the trace spacing and pin spacing limitations of the home etched board

      1. Yes, it’s a little problem that I found, I am searching to work with an easy to make at home pcb, with home etching limitation this is the more small layout that I can get, with double layer PCB will be better, but, I don’t have enough money to do this

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