Hello Everyone. I’m Yoonji Kim from KAIST.
Today, I will introduce SchemaBoard, a physical computing tool for makers helping to assembly and inspect the circuit.
This work is collaborated with Hyein Lee, Ramkrishna Prasad, Seungwoo Je, Youngkyung Choi, Daniel Ashbrook, and Ian Oakley and is advised by Andrea Bianchi.
Many makers struggle with reading schematic circuit diagrams.
They can use the pictorial circuit diagram,
still, there are hitches as the physical circuit gradually diverged from the pictorial reference.
To inspect the mismatched circuit with reference, makers should understand the topologies of the pictorial circuit and it is difficult.
To address this issue, we propose SchemaBoard.
SchemaBoard is an LED-backlit solderless breadboard that can programmatically illuminate its rows to reflect the components or nets
that are interactively selected in a schematic shown in a companion software application on a tablet PC.
Booth et al pointed out the difficulties of building circuits.
There are systems to aid users, but they focus on learning and do not work with schematic diagrams.
There are also augmented breadboards to help makers, but they do not support for the situations in which circuits are still under construction.
To better understand the issues during circuit breadboarding, and inform the potential solutions
We conducted a comparison study between pictorial circuit diagram and traditional schematic diagram.
We could infer the reason for the higher workload of the pictorial circuit from the results of comparing reference and physical circuit.
There were inconsistencies between pictorial reference and the actual circuit on the breadboard.
In the qualitative results, users reported that the schematic is difficult to interpret and translate for the breadboard circuit.
The pictorial circuit is easy to use, but it gradually diverged from pictorial reference due to accidental mistranslation or intentional improvement.
As a result, users needed to convert pictorial circuit into a schematic and map it onto the breadboard again for reviewing.
However, participants said the schematic circuit benefits them in problem-solving due to it’s logical and abstract representation.
The formative study results suggest a need for tools that can combine the advantageous qualities of both abstract and pictorial representations of circuits.
Based on the formative study, we developed the system which highlights the location of hardware components.
This is the SchemaBoard hardware.
It is an Arduino shield that consists of LEDs and shift registers.
Users can import custom designed schematic circuit files to the SchemaBoard system.
SchemaBoard highlight the location on the breadboard for the selected component.
To indicate the components’ polarity, SchemaBoard blinks the led.
Also, SchemaBoard blinks the led for the 1st pin for the chip.
SchemaBoard also uses highlighting to show all the rows connected to selected electrical nets, giving an overview of connectivity even on crowded breadboards.
In Guide mode, SchemaBoard guides users to place hardware components first and then depict the locations for wires.
Guide mode provides step-by-step circuit assembly for all the elements of a circuit.
So, users can easily complete the circuit without mistakes or bugs.
We conducted an evaluation study with 16 makers to compare the tasks of assembly and inspection of circuits
using either SchemaBoard or a baseline involving the traditional use of schematic diagrams.
In the quantitative results, completion rates were signiﬁcantly higher in the inspection task for the SchemaBoard group
Also, SchemaBoard led to signiﬁcantly faster performance with fewer errors than the baseline.
The success rate of the SchemaBoard group was higher than the baseline group in both assembly and inspection.
SchemaBoard group appreciated the easy and intuitive interface of SchemaBoard.
Also, all participants reported that SchemaBoard supported them though they have different levels of expertise.
In this presentation, we proposed a system SchemaBoard.
From the formative study results, we derived a need for tools that can combine the advantageous qualities of both abstract and pictorial representations of circuits.
Based on that, we designed and developed the SchemaBoard system.
The results of the evaluation study showed that SchamaBoard led to faster prototyping, fewer errors, less workload, and more confidence in circuit implementation.
Thank you.