Berfboard was originally a prototype board that had designed to have connections similar to a breadboard but then I had an idea of combining a power supply into it. The power supply can provide +5V or +3.3V which would be ideal for certain Arduino or Raspberry Pi projects. Having a built-in power supply would make it much more convenient as you would just need a DC power adapter or a +9V battery to power everything up instead of adding additional wires for power and connecting it to an external power supply.
Circuit
I designed the schematic and PCB in KiCad because it’s free and open source 🙂
The circuit is actually fairly simple as you can see below. However, using a simple voltage regulator circuit has its limitations but it gets the job done. I will try adding a buck converter circuit in a later revision.
PCB Layout
It took a while to do the PCB layout but eventually, I came up with this. I didn’t connect the power strips directly to the power rails, so you’re gonna have to solder a wire or something to connect it. The reason I did this was to give the user the choice between which voltage they would want to use when prototyping their circuit.
Want the board design files and schematic ? No worries it’s open hardware, you can get it from here https://github.com/Chromico/Berfboard-2.0-PSupply .
In Part 2 of this project, I’ll take a look at the final PCBs and Stencil kindly provided by PCBWay 🙂 and also assemble the boards.