PC controlled Breadboard

Thread Starter

TehDawg

Joined Feb 4, 2011
8
Good day Forum.

I had the idea for a PC controlled breadboard, i made a post on HAD aswell.

"I woke up this morning after a refreshing 2 hour sleep, and had this idea.
I am currently working on few projects that I get online, and make them on a breadboard for prototyping. But one thing that annoys the Sh1t out of me is cutting and placing wires every time I need a connection between pins & parts. So I thought, can't we just control the breadboard via some software on a pc, that tells it which pins to connect eg. "connect line 1A to line 14B etc.
Of course there would need to be a pcb mounted below the breadboard that connects to all the pins, and then some control chip which interfaces with the PC, which in turn then would be able to connect the pins I want with without having to stick a wire in every time.
Any input would be appreciated!"

They suggested I look into FGPA. I have browsed about, but FGPA seem very complex. Does anyone have some help or ideas? Would I be able to control the FGPA via usb on a computer?

Regards

Teh Dawg
 

debjit625

Joined Apr 17, 2010
790
They suggested I look into FGPA. I have browsed about, but FGPA seem very complex. Does anyone have some help or ideas? Would I be able to control the FGPA via usb on a computer?
They didnt suggested it in that way.

Its not FGPA its FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array),inside these chips they consist of a large numbers of logical gates now we can connect these gate to create some logical circuit (even we prototype microcontrollers and microprocessors with them),now what we do is we create a logical circuit in an application program in our PC,and this program creates a file (we call it netlist) which consist of information about the connection to be made inside the FPGA to create the logical circuit and we transfer this file to FPGA from PC.Now this process is very complex as you have already gussed ,inside the FPGA these connection is done using a matrix kind of stuff which consist thousand or more elements each representing a connection node and inside a silicon chip you can think how small each element can be (in nano scale).

Now whats the point,its simple you can create that kind of stuff but you cant do it in nano scale using CMOS ot transistors.You have to use discrete transistors or may be you want to do it using relay with latch circuit but the size of that kind of network will be too big.

Good Luck
 
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