The Bench Assistant

Today on Rework Tuesday, we present our latest design:  the Bench Assistant.

I found myself struggling with unwieldy connections for power and jacks to my prototypes on solderless breadboards.  The original concept comes from a gadget I must have picked up along with a misc parts kits, which uses a wall wart to provide power to the rails of solderless breadboards, I decided to design one that would solve most of the prototyping problems I kept stumbling over:

1. Runs off a synth power supply, putting +12 (in my case) on the top red rail, -12 on the bottom, and ground elsewhere.
2. 5V output to the top header pin.
   
3. Power pins on both sides, binds together N+1 breadboards for N Assistants, limited only by space.
   
4. A function generator provides ramp/sawtooth/triangle, trigger and variable duty cycle gate signals. 
5. Three each of 100K pots and mono 1/8" audio jacks.
   
6. 16 header pins accessible from either side.

With the Assistant snugly bound into the breadboards, the func gen features, pots and jacks can be connected via the headers.   The initial design has right-angle headers but not that I look at it, this take up a bit much real estate so the next build will have these vertical.  100k pots are most useful but anything in a Bourns PTV09A footprint will work.