Maker Kevin Santo Cappuccio has considerably upgraded the magical Jumperless Breadboard — which, because the title suggests, connects elements collectively and not using a single jumper wire required — by including a probing mode, permitting connections to be made simply by prodding the place you need them to go.

Cappuccio confirmed off the preliminary capabilities of the Jumperless Breadboard again in March final yr: a solderless breadboard by which elements will be programmatically linked with out the necessity for jumper wires. The key: a community of 11 crosspoint switches hidden beneath the breadboard, initially accepting directions from a controlling gadget by way of UART or I2C buses.

In August, the undertaking had reached the purpose that it was excess of a proof of idea — as Cappuccio demonstrated with a undertaking to show a classic 16mm digital camera right into a timelapse images system, prototyped utilizing a later revision of the Jumperless idea outfitted with eye-catching RGB LEDs.

The breadboard’s newest revision, although, consists of one thing designed to dramatically pace up its rewiring: a bodily probe, which helps you to rewire the connections on-the-fly while not having to attach the gadget to a bunch laptop. “The brand new Jumperless firmware (1.3.1) can scan the board actually shortly (~100 occasions per second) to search for the PWM [Pulse Width Modulation] sign coming from the probe,” Cappuccio explains. “So now you possibly can simply poke out the connections you need to make and the Jumperless will make them into actual {hardware} connections. No laptop required.

“You do not even must make a probe like I did right here, a bit of wire shoved into GPIO [General-Purpose Input/Output pin] 19 will work too. And also you simply faucet the wire to GPIO 18 to behave because the button. Close to the tip [of the demo video I’m clearing the connections by holding down the BOOT button, you can also double tap BOOT to load the last circuit you made.”

To show just how flexible the new mode is, Cappuccio has recorded a video showing a Jumperless being used to wire a counter circuit from scratch in just two and a half minutes — still without any flying jumper wires.

The Jumperless is available on Cappuccio’s Tindie store at $299, plus $39 for an optional acrylic carry case; the latest hardware revision includes a probe kit. The hardware design files and firmware source code are available on GitHub under the CERN Open Hardware License Version 2 Weakly Reciprocal and permissive MIT license respectively.