Designing myself a breadboard prototyping rig

[Grubb]

I am designing myself a full-featured breadboard prototyping rig PCB. Just wanting ideas from others about useful features they have or wish they had in their prototyping setups.

So far my design has two MB-102 breadboards, stereo in/out jacks, multiple voltages up to 18v, some SPDT and DPDT switches, a power on/off, an effect on/off toggle, up to 6 pots, and an additional TRS jack that can be used as expression or MIDI. I also included a vero/PCB interface, an idea I nicked from the Mimmtronics PROTIS. I've designed an active Baxandall tonestack PCB that slots into the interface and am thinking through some other modules that could be interesting to develop, perhaps a tone generator or sine wave oscillator.

What else would be useful to add?

 

[BuddytheReow]

On mine, I put a LED indicator to let me know the circuit is on. Also a tone generator to see if my circuit is working/alive. Oh, and a built in probe that can also be used for a voltage meter.

 

[rwl]

I'd love to see what you've worked up... Or get a PCB. I want to get more into breadboarding but I've been put off mostly by the pain of hooking up pots to the breadboard. But I haven't gotten around to laying out a PCB myself.

I'm kinda picturing this looking like a mega-Auditorium. So it could be cool to have both a way to have connectors active to both a breadboard and a populated PCB (via alligator clips) at the same time, even running one into the other. Maybe that's the PCB interface you referred to.

 

[Feral Feline]

Sag, for simulating starved-voltage circuits such as the Factory of Fuzz.

Headphone amp, for testing when everyone else is asleep.
Toggle to divert signal to amp 'cause sometimes it might get loud.

Tone gen as BtR mentioned, so you can focus two hands on knob-twirling or trouble-shooting instead of strummoninging... but have that toggleable with an input 'cause sometimes you need to strum and not listen to a tone generator and sometimes you want to stream music while you work through the headphones so there's that input to wire up, too.

Maybe a pot on the input, for simulating hitting a circuit with an anemic signal
Clean boost to hit circuits with hard gain
unity buffer for messing with other circuits impedance/Fuzz-tolerance for buffers etc

Toggle for going between the circuit's return and the probe.


Toaster Oven & Drip-coffee machine to test circuits' tolerances to heat & humidity — and can make toasties and coffee for a snack, not to mention baking finishes on enclosures.

Magnetic-rake for picking up those lead-clippings that went flying.

Clock for timing those delay repeats, and for letting you know you've worked into the wee hours which means you'll need a...
Murphy-bed for when you've just gotta crash 'cause you've cut the leads 3 times and there's still two shorts...

 

[CheapSuitG]

I'd love to see what you've worked up... Or get a PCB. I want to get more into breadboarding but I've been put off mostly by the pain of hooking up pots to the breadboard. But I haven't gotten around to laying out a PCB myself.

I'm kinda picturing this looking like a mega-Auditorium. So it could be cool to have both a way to have connectors active to both a breadboard and a populated PCB (via alligator clips) at the same time, even running one into the other. Maybe that's the PCB interface you referred to.

The protoboard is great and probably a platform that could be modded a little bit to do that.