Breadboard

A breadboard, or protoboard, is a construction base for prototyping of electronics.A common use in the system on a chip (SoC) era is to obtain an microcontroller (MCU) on a pre-assembled printed circuit board (PCB) which exposes an array of input/output (IO) pins in a header suitable to plug into a breadboard, and then to prototype a circuit which exploits one or more of the MCU’s peripherals, such as general-purpose input/output (GPIO), UART/USART serial transceivers, analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital-to-analog converter (DAC), pulse-width modulation (PWM; used in motor control), Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI), or I²C.Firmware is then developed for the MCU to test, debug, and interact with the circuit prototype. High frequency operation is then largely confined to the SoC’s PCB.