VirtualWire: Supporting Rapid Prototyping with Instant Reconfigurations of Wires in Breadboarded Circuits

Assembling circuits is a challenging and time-consuming activity for novice makers, frequently resulting in incorrect placements of wires and components into breadboards. This results in errors that are difficult to identify and debug, and delays that hinder creating, exploring, or reconfiguring circuit layouts.

VirtualWire allows users to rapidly design and modify circuits in software and have these changes instantiated in real-time as electrical connections on a physical breadboard. The system dynamically translates circuit design files into physical connections inside a hardware switching matrix, which handles wiring across breadboard rows and to/from an embedded Arduino. Users can interactively test, tune, and share different circuit layouts for an Arduino shield and, once satisfied, fabricate the circuit on a permanent substrate.

Quantitative and qualitative user studies demonstrate that VirtualWire significantly reduces the time taken for circuit assembly (by 37%) and the number of errors made during assembly (by 53%), while also supporting users in creating readable, space-efficient, and flexible layouts.

Video Presentation

@inproceedings{10.1145/3430524.3440623,
  author = {Lee, Woojin and Prasad, Ramkrishna and Je, Seungwoo and Kim, Yoonji and Oakley, Ian and Ashbrook, Daniel and Bianchi, Andrea},
  title = {VirtualWire: Supporting Rapid Prototyping with Instant Reconfigurations of Wires in Breadboarded Circuits},
  year = {2021},
  isbn = {9781450382137},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3440623},
  doi = {10.1145/3430524.3440623},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction},
  articleno = {4},
  numpages = {12},
  keywords = {Physical computing, circuits, system., virtual wires},
  location = {Salzburg, Austria},
  series = {TEI '21}
}