bread 'n' butter

Bread’n’Butter

Yes, it’s a bread board prototyping system. Inspired by bastl’s Ohm Synth which I use to this day.

I really didn’t have a choice but to make this :) I’m working on too many things at the same time to clear the breadboards all the time.

I’ve used B’n’B or the Ohmsynth to make a lot of cirucits. It’s great for trying stuff like the series from Elliot Williams at https://hackaday.com/series_of_posts/logic-noise/ Obviously it’s also suited to trying out stuff from Bastl’s original minilab series at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBF4KYAe97cSukS3hmykjEXSq3LH7LmEO although bread ’n is not exactly the same.

Bread’n’Butter is a 1660 point breadboard prototypying system on a bread board :) It’s open hardware so you can also just make it yourself (see below).

The two pcbs include:

• 4x100k pots mainboard
• 5 x 5k button board
• 5v and 9v power,
• a vactrol (!),
• LED input
• LDR input,
• an amplifier section base on the lm386n
• 3.5 mm audio input and output,
• 2 switches
• 2 touch areas
• a speaker
• a 9volt input and battery holder
• an array of buttons wired to allow ‘playing’ resistances (also additive).
• and a bread board :)

The speaker is quite small and so not really good for stuff in the bass region. But it’s sufficient for most higher frequency testing. The outputs can drive headphones or an amp, BUT, one needs to be careful to turn down the gain and volume. Works well if one takes care.

I was very grateful to Casper Electronics and bastl for their ‘Ohmsynth’ system with which I built tons of prototypes. Since they haven’t made that in years, I made bread’n’butter.

The fritzing design files and ready to produce Gerber files can be found at https://github.com/poetaster/breadnbutter with the button pot board being the same as https://github.com/poetaster/billow

Making banners

And this is the first thing I made with bread n’ butter: banners

https://github.com/poetaster/banners

Buy it?

You can purchase a built bread’n’butter from me for 120 euros. I don’t offer kits. If you are more comfortable with online stores, it’s available at https://tonetoys.etsy.com and at https://www.tindie.com/stores/poetaster/