Wire Your Way: Hardware-Contextualized Guidance and In-situ Tests for Personalized Circuit Prototyping

The increasing popularity of microcontroller platforms such as Arduino allows a wide range of creators to participate in circuit prototyping. Tutorials serve as an essential learning method for makers, and several prior toolkits use this format. However, literature and our formative study (N=12) show that makers have unique preferences regarding the construction of their circuits and idiosyncratic ways to assess and debug problems, which contrasts with the step-by-step instructional nature of tutorials and those systems leveraging this method. To address this mismatch, we present a prototyping platform that supports personalized circuit construction and debugging. The system utilizes an augmented breadboard that supports on-the-fly hardware reconfiguration via contextualized guidance and in-situ circuit validation through interactive tests. Through a usability study (N=12), we demonstrate how makers leverage circuit-aware guidance and debugging to support individual building patterns.

@inproceedings{10.1145/3772318.3791371,
    author = {Lertjaturaphat, Punn and Rhee, Jungwoo and You, Jaewon and Bianchi, Andrea},
    title = {Wire Your Way: Hardware-Contextualized Guidance and In-situ Tests for Personalized Circuit Prototyping},
    year = {2026},
    isbn = {9798400722783},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791371},
    doi = {10.1145/3772318.3791371},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
    articleno = {1471},
    numpages = {19},
    keywords = {Physical computing, Circuit prototyping, Maker tools, Hardware development},
    series = {CHI '26}
}