Welcome back to the factory. This week the protoboards have arrived for the perfect protoboard. We have a major update for PiicoDev and we take a sneak peek at KiCad 6. Let's do it.

Yes, last week we began our quest for the perfect protoboard. Today the prototypes have arrived and there's even been a few design changes between now and then. Let's take a closer look at what's been changed. We've made some minor changes to the artwork just to make things a little bit clearer to read. The bus labels have changed and that's because on the back we've actually included some solder jumper options so that you can easily connect those power input options to the centre bus. So you'll see that the centre bus is labelled positive and negative while every other bus just has a bus number.

So by soldering these jumpers on the back you can select whether the say USB connector or the DC jack connector or either of the terminals connect to that centre bus. And that way you can get power into the breadboard without soldering any wires. You're just soldering on the socket or the terminals and just closing those jumpers. I guess a side effect of that is that you can also route power from one option to the other by closing multiple jumpers. The other buses are left unconnected.

You can of course you can connect them if you want but we've also lined them up with some of the power input options to make connecting to that option really really easy. For instance on the USB side the connections for USB power are on the same line as that bus. So you can just drop in like a bit of pre-cut breadboard wire or like a trimmed off bit of resistor lead and easily close that gap and deliver power to this bus. And likewise on the DC jack side it's all on a 2.5 millimetre grid so you can easily close that gap if you want to and deliver power directly to that centre bus as well. And so I've tried to indicate that functionality as clearly as we can on the back with this artwork that kind of outlines all the power options and also the polarity of each jumper that you might want to solder.

So that maybe you only want to connect all the grounds together that's okay. And so likewise for the four-way terminals each terminal that relates to power delivery we've also just marked that out with some silkscreen just to help things along.

Now you might be wondering why this ugly bit of red tape is at the bottom of the breadboard that's where the name of the product is going to go and I'm just not quite ready to release that yet it's not my baby the name but stay tuned for that. And of course we tested it with the accessories as promised there's the USB B connector, there's the DC jack and here's some 5 millimetre terminals, nice.

One pretty common experience when you're prototyping on a regular breadboard with say a Raspberry Pi Pico or a Particle Argon you know those kind of dip style dev boards when you put them on the breadboard you wind up with only two connection rows on either side. You've only got two options for each pin. As we were designing this breadboard we also stuck to that tradition we put in five tie points but once those prototypes come in we we can see there's quite a lot of extra space with those buses.

Wouldn't it be nice to deviate from tradition a little bit and increase that to six per side that means that when you bring in a Raspberry Pi Pico for example there's an extra tie point per row bringing it to three instead of two. And that could really beYou know, that could really save the day. So we've already got a design revision in works and I expect that'll be the final one. I'm looking forward to that arriving. And of course, while we were at it, we decided to put in a design for a full-size and half-size breadboard design. These are with circular tie points tied in rows across the back, and these ones already have that update with six tie points per row. It's pretty tricky to make out, but there is actually a silk line in between each tie point to indicate what are rows and what are columns. Say with the six along the row here and then the vertical bus down the middle. In the next revision of this, we'll increase that thickness so that it's a little bit easier to see.

So we've got the full size, we've got the half size, and we're running a little experiment with just a point-to-point wiring protoboard on FR4. We've got three different spacings for the pads. We have 200 micron, 300, and 400 micron, and we just had to know what would give the best soldering experience. So under the microscope here is soldering the 200 micron pads, and these are about at the limit of what the manufacturer can put mask in between. There's mask in between a lot of the tires, but it's also flaking off because it's just too thin in between those pads. So it's very easy to make bridges, it's probably a little bit tricky to clear mistakes, for example, trying to wipe solder from in between two pads.

With 300 micron spacing, the solder mask is much more reliable, and it's still easy enough to create bridges. Although it is much easier to clear unintended bridges, and you know the same is true for the 400 micron as well. So at this point, it's probably going to be one of these two sizes. We found that.Having a mask was probably preferable to not having a mask, just to make it a little bit easier for beginners to clear mistakes. And also, it just looks nicer around areas where there are no tie points. Just a little bit more of a familiar aesthetic.

From last week's video, Ian Burtenshaw says to please make them pre-tinned to make soldering much easier. And also, that they've had experience with protoboards in the past where they drop pads as you solder them. Well, I can tell you that these are honest to goodness FR4 with lead-free hot air leveled solder as the finish. They are pre-tinned. Now, of course, you can drop a pad if you really gouge at it with a hot iron. But here's a little demonstration of me soldering a pin and trying to tear it out, and I just break the pin instead. So, successful test drive, I think we're ready to put these into production.

In PiicoDev news, yesterday we silently released a bit of a major and overdue upgrade for PiicoDev. PiicoDev can now work across user-selectable I2C buses. Before, it was defaulting to whichever I2C bus was default for the hardware platform you were working on. Say, for a Pico, it was I2C0, for a Raspberry Pi, it was I2C1. Now, when you initialize a device, the bus is user-selectable, and that means that, say, for this distance sensor that has a single fixed address, we can now operate two just by having one wired to one bus and the other wired to another bus. And you can see a live demo running here where I have two unique distances being plotted in the shell and on the plotter. And I can measure those two devices independently. And this is what I mean, this is actually the distance sensor example code that I've just modified very slightly to include the second sensor. And you can see that. Here, distance sensor one is initialized as per usual with PiicoDev. But we have a second distance sensor and all we need to do is pass it the argument bus equals one to use I2C bus number one. And then you can just treat them as independent sensors, call read on both and print the results.

And finally, a preview of something that we've been working on this week. This is a power timer but it's not really the design I want to talk about. You might notice that KiCad here looks a little different and that's because we're experimenting with KiCad 5.99 which is the release candidate for the upcoming KiCad 6. Now why would we pull the trigger on going to a nightly build of KiCad when KiCad 5 has so far served us very well. If I jump into the CAD viewer and flip to the back side of the board you might notice this nice little design feature here. This is unusual for KiCad. KiCad, you know, you're used to seeing the standard KiCad silkscreen font. But here we have these nice kind of negative labels and in a different font.

What's going on here? KiCad 6 is actually compatible with a plugin called KiBuzzard. Buzzard is a project by SparkFun that they created for Eagle to create those really nice aesthetic labels. And so of course the open source community does what the open source community does. Over on GitHub Greg Devil has ported Buzzard to KiBuzzard so it's now compatible with KiCad.

What that means is with the click of a button we can now open this pane and enter in some sample text. A feature that's long overdue for KiCad is being able to change that font. But I think what makes this really nice is the ability to add end caps. So if you add these two round end caps you get that nice pill shape that we've been trying.To emulate on all our PiicoDev modules so far, we have to illustrate the label in Illustrator or Inkscape and then import it as a footprint into KiCad. This process requires manually curating all of these labels. However, with KiBuzzard, you can now create labels on the fly, providing a major workflow upgrade for modules that require custom labels. For example, with the power timer, we would have had to create seven graphical assets and import them as footprints. Now, we can simply make them as needed. Thank you, Greg, for this improvement.

In the coming weeks and months, we are likely to upgrade all of our machines to use KiCad 5.99 or KiCad 6. The current version is stable, and the quality of life upgrades it offers cannot be ignored, especially for creating beautiful boards. We have already noticed that KiCad 6 has many quality of life upgrades, so we may do a video on that in the future. If you have any questions or would like to see anything in more detail, please open a thread on the Core Electronics forums. Thank you for watching, and until next time.