The Toastboard: Ubiquitous Instrumentation and Automated Checking of Breadboarded Circuits
Daniel Drew, Julie L. Newcomb, William McGrath, Filip Maksimovic, David Mellis, Björn Hartmann

UIST '16: ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Session: Electronics Printing & Prototyping

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.

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Recorded at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in Tokyo, Japan, October 16-19, 2016

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