An Ingenious Arduino to Breadboard Adapter

When I work on a development project, I’ve become a big fan of using development boards that have the Arduino headers on them. The vast number of shields that easily connect to these headers is phenomenal. The one problem that I’ve always had though was that there is always a need to use a breadboard to test a circuit or integrate a sensor that just isn’t in an Arduino header format. The result is a wiring mess that can result in loose or missing connections.

I was recently talking with Max Maxfield and he pointed me to a really cool adapter board designed to remove these wiring jumpers to a breadboard. Max wrote about this board here but I’m so excited about this that I thought I’d add my two cents as well.

(Source: https://www.eeweb.com)

The BreadShield, which can be purchased at https://www.crowdsupply.com/loser/breadshield, adapts the Arduino headers to a linear set of header pins designed to be plugged into a breadboard. You can see in the image below that this completely removes all the extra jumpers that one would normally require which has the potential to remove quite a few jumper wires.

(Source: https://www.eeweb.com)

When I heard about these, I purchased three assembled units for about $28 which saves me the time from having to assemble the adapter myself. DIY assembly runs for about $15 for a set of three boards. Either way, a great price to remove a bunch of wires from the workbench.

Now I’m still waiting for mine to arrive, but from the image, you can see that the one challenge to using these adapters might be adapting the height of your breadboard to your hardware stack. While this could be an issue, I keep various length spacers around the office so that I can adapt board heights and undoubtedly there will be a length that will ensure these line up properly.