Schematic in, breadboard out.
A friend of mine who is trying to get into electrical engineering came to me with a problem. He understood the schematics, but he was confused about how to wire them on a breadboard. I figured other students probably have the same problem, so I built AMPierre.
AMPierre is built first for students in their first circuits course, who can read a schematic but haven't wired many breadboards yet. Hobbyists can use it the same way for their own builds.
Every hole belongs to a hidden strip of metal. Five holes in a column form one strip; the channel down the middle splits the board into two halves that are not connected; the rails along the edges run the full length of the board and carry power and ground. Once that picture clicks, layouts start to make sense.
A net is every point in a circuit that must be the same electrical node. Hover over or tap any part and AMPierre lights up its net. That's what you'd check with a multimeter, and it's how you catch errors, such as a missing jumper or a short.
Diodes have a cathode band, electrolytic capacitors a stripe, LEDs a flat edge, ICs a notch beside pin 1, and transistors a flat face. Polarised parts are marked right on the board, on the side each lead actually goes.
Resistors are drawn with their colour bands, ceramic capacitors with their three-digit code, and every chip and transistor comes with a pinout diagram, so you learn to find the right part in the drawer, not only in the drawing.
Start with the power off. Place the chips and transistors first, then the other components, then the wires, and connect the supply last. Make sure continuity is right before you switch on. The timeline follows that order, one step at a time.
You draw the schematic or paste its SPICE netlist, which lists which components connect to each other. From there, Python algorithms decide where each component goes. No AI is used in the breadboard wiring itself, though the algorithm was developed with the help of AI. It is tuned for clean, easy-to-read layouts, so students can follow the wiring without getting lost.
The parts are laid out to follow the schematic: parts that hang from the supply rail, transistors and chips in the middle, and parts that stand on the ground rail. Every jumper then runs flat along a row or straight down a column, so none of them overlap. The rare jumper that has to go corner to corner is drawn arched, the way a real flexible wire hops over the board. AMPierre also shows where the bench supply and the wave generator clip on, and it checks every connection before showing you anything, so the board you see is electrically the circuit you drew.
AMPierre isn't a simulator. It shows you how to build a circuit, not whether the circuit works. If your circuit doesn't work, the problem may not be the layout.
One of my own projects, and the biggest circuit that ships with AMPierre. I designed and simulated it in LTspice, then built it on a breadboard. An input amp feeds three filters (bass, mid and treble), each with its own knob. Three buffers keep the filters from loading each other, a summing amplifier mixes the bands back together, and a peak detector and comparator light an LED when the output gets close to clipping.
When I was starting out as an electrical engineering student, I wished I had a tool like this to help with my breadboard builds.
Electrical engineering student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and teaching assistant for Electric Circuits. I built AMPierre for the students I work with in lab, and for anyone learning to build circuits for the first time.
I'm interested in how AI tools and new technology can help people work faster and make better decisions.
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