What, bread and what?

Bread'n'Butter is a 1660 point breadboard prototypying system on a bread board :) It has everything on board to do quick prototyping of small audio circuits. It's open hardware so you can also just make it yourself (see below).

The two pcbs include:

• 9 potentiometers (4x100k mainboard, 5 x 5k button board)
• 5v and 9v power,
• a vactrol (!),
• LED input
• LDR input
• an small amplifier based on a simple lm386 circuit
• 3.5 mm 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 :)
• I include a 65 piece jumper set with Bread'n'butter, so you have something to work with.

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.

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

Why did you make it?

I usually just build these for me when I have something set up and don't want to tear it down to try something else. I usually have 4 or 5 things going on at a time. So, I had some extra materials and thought I'd offer it to you.

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

I also wanted to keep it simple so that everything in the system can easily be a part of a 'completed' project.

What makes it special?

Well, there's nothing like it on the market. There are some similar to a point systems like those from erica synths. But nothing as simple and compact as this.