The Li'lBoard product line.

This rapid prototyping board system has these advantages:

• Mounting arrangement: cheap and versatile ;
• Interconnection flexibility: at least three ways of wiring them together  and the methods can easily be mixed in any build;
• Support calculators: online design assistance  to make your build time even shorter;
• Open source design files for the boards in Eagle, open source outline files in several formats;
• A large variety of designs: over 60 designs verified, more to come. See the Tables, below...

I'm showing the designs by breaking them up into three categories. I've found that the biggest difficulty in releasing the idea “into the wild” is that there are too darn many of them! When I heard about Eric Ries's MVP (Minimum Viable Product) concept in an Amp Hour episode that seemed to be the solution: pick just a minimum number of designs to concentrate on at first. So that is the first table. The second table is more of a shopping list of boards that I have built at least some of but which I deem to be not as essential, and the third list shows those boards that are in work: some of these have problems and some are still concepts or just design files currently.

Table 1, the “MVP” set:

Showing 22 boards. Each cell in the table is a link to a board's design page.

Table 2, Designs that are available but are not highest priority:

(Most have been produced in pre-production quantities, at various revision levels. Some of these may be available in small quantities: ask!)

Showing 37 boards.

Table 3, Designs that are in work:

Some have been made, but need re-thinking, some are not started, and some are fully designed and samples have been made.

Showing 15 boards.

The total of all three tables above is 74 designs.

Some further considerations:

• Some tips on how to make your own boards can be found here ;
• Notes on some of the best tools to use can be found here .
• And, a little bit about the history of the idea can be found here.

Contact TC about this page.