A special forces soldier involved in the operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department. His alleged crime? Making numerous bets on the prediction market Polymarket that Maduro would be removed from power, for which he is said to have made upwards of $400,000.

Authorities claim Gannon Ken Van Dyke, who was involved in the “planning and execution” of Operation Absolute Resolve (the stratagem that toppled and captured the Venezuelan leader), made bets on Polymarket about whether the U.S. would deploy forces into Venezuela and remove Maduro from power.

Van Dyke was arrested on Thursday, CBS reports, citing a law enforcement source.

Federal officials say that Van Dyke’s wagers were informed by classified information he had access to as a result of being a government insider. The government notes that Van Dyke signed nondisclosure agreements prohibiting him from ever divulging, publishing, or revealing “by writing, words, conduct, or otherwise . . . any classified or sensitive information” related to the military operations he was involved with.

In December, Van Dyke created a Polymarket account and began making wagers involving “Maduro- and Venezuela-related markets,” officials say. Between December 27, 2025 and January 26 of this year, he allegedly made 13 bets totaling some $33,034 in total on things like “U.S. Forces in Venezuela . . . by January 31, 2026” and “Maduro out by . . . January 31, 2026.” Officials say that, after collecting his winnings, Van Dyke also took steps to cover up his ties to the account that made the wagers.

Van Dyke faces a variety of charges, including violating the Commodity Exchange Act, wire fraud, and making an unlawful monetary transaction.

“Our men and women in uniform are trusted with classified information in order to accomplish their mission as safely and effectively as possible, and are prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Widespread access to prediction markets is a relatively new phenomenon, but federal laws protecting national security information fully apply.”

Prediction markets have inspired controversy ever since their launch. But over the past year, the sites have grown in prominence and influence, striking deals with media outlets and sports organizations while also seeing widespread use, including by public officials. Legislation is currently being mulled that would ban public officials from using nonpublic information to make bets on prediction sites.

Tom Burick has always considered himself a builder. Over the years he’s designed robots, constructed a vintage teardrop trailer, and most recently, led a group of students in building a full-scale replica of a pivotal 1940s computer.

Burick is a technology instructor at PS Academy in Gilbert, Ariz., a middle and high school for students with autism and other specialized learning needs. At the start of the 2025–26 school year, he began a project with his students to build a full-scale replica of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, for the 80th anniversary of the historic computer’s construction. ENIAC was one of the world’s first programmable electronic computers. When it was built, it was about one thousand times as fast as other machines.

Before becoming a teacher, Burick owned a robotics company for a decade in the 2000s. But when a financial downturn forced him to close the business, he turned to teaching. “I had so many amazing people help me when I was young [who] really gave me their time and resources, and really changed the trajectory of my life,” Burick says. “I thought I need to pay that forward.”

Becoming a Roboticist

As a young child in Latrobe, Pa., Burick watched the television show Lost in Space, which includes a robot character who protects the family. “He was the young boy’s best friend, and I was so captivated by that. I remember thinking to myself, I want that in my life. And that started that lifelong love affair with robotics and technology.”

He started building toy robots out of anything he could find, and in junior high school, he began adding electronics. “By early high school, I was building full-fledged autonomous, microprocessor-controlled machines,” he says. At age 15, he built a 150-pound steel firefighting robot, for which he won awards from IEEE and other organizations.

Burick kept building robots and reached out for help from local colleges and universities. He first got in touch with a student at Carnegie Mellon University, who invited him to visit campus. “My parents drove me down the next weekend, and he gave me a tour of the robotics lab. I was mesmerized. He sent me home with college textbooks and piles of metal and gears and wires,” Burick says. He would read the textbook a page at a time, reading it again and again until he felt he had an understanding of it. Then, to help fill gaps in his understanding, he got in touch with a robotics instructor at Saint Vincent College, in his hometown of Latrobe, who let him sit in on classes. Each of these adults, he says, “helped change the trajectory of my life.”

Toward the end of high school, Burick realized that college wouldn’t be the right environment for him. “I was drawn to real-world problem-solving rather than structured coursework and I chose to continue along that path,” he says. Additionally, Burick has dyscalculia, which makes traditional mathematics more challenging for him. “It pushed me to develop alternative methods of engineering.”

The ENIAC replica Burick’s students built precisely matches what the original computer would have looked like before it was disassembled in the 1950s. Robert Gamboa

When he graduated, he worked in several tech jobs before starting his own company. In 2000, he opened a computer retail store and adjacent robotics business, White Box Robotics. The idea for the company came when Burick was building a “white box” PC from standard, off-the-shelf components, and realized there was no comparable product for robotics.

So, he started developing a modular, general-purpose platform that applied white box PC standards to mobile robots. “The robot’s chassis was like a box of Legos,” he says. You could click together two torsos to double its payload, switch out the drive system, or swap its head for a different set of sensors. He filed utility and design patents for the platform, called the 914 PC-Bot, and after merging with a Canadian defense robotics company called Frontline Robotics, started production. They sold about 200 robots in 17 countries, Burick says.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. White Box Robotics held on for a couple of years, shuttering in late 2010. “I got to live my life’s dream for 10 years,” he says. After closing White Box, “there was some soul searching” about what to do next. He recalled the impact his own mentors had, and decided to pay it forward by teaching.

Neurodiversity as a Superpower

In 2013, Burick started working in a vocational training program for young adults living with autism. The program didn’t have a technical arm, so he started one and ran it until 2019, when he was hired to be a technology instructor at PS Academy Arizona.

Burick and one of his students assemble the base for one of ENIAC’s three portable function tables, which contained banks of switches that stored numerical constants. Bri Mason

Burick feels he can connect with his students, because he is also neurodivergent. Throughout his childhood, he was told what he wasn’t able to do because of his dyscalculia diagnosis. “People tell you what it takes, but they never tell you what it gives,” Burick says.

In adulthood, he realized that some of his strengths are linked to dyscalculia, too, like strong 3D spatial reasoning. “I have this CAD program that runs in my head 24 hours a day,” he says. “I think the reason I was successful in robotics, truly, was because of the dyscalculia…. To me, [it] has always been a superpower.”

Whenever his students say something disparaging about living with autism, he shares his own experience. “You need to have maybe just a bit more tenacity than others, because there are parts of it you do have to fight through, but you come through with gifts and strengths,” he tells them.

And Burick’s classes aim to play to those strengths. “I didn’t want my technology program to feel like craft hour,” he says. Instead, through projects like the ENIAC replica, students can leverage traits many of them share, like the abilities to hyperfocus and to precisely repeat tasks.

Recreating ENIAC

Burick has taught his students about ENIAC for several years. While reading about it, he learned that the massive, 27-tonne computer was dismantled and partially destroyed after being decommissioned in 1955. Although a few of ENIAC’s 40 original panels are on display at museums, “there was no hope of ever seeing it together again. We wanted to give the world that experience,” Burick says.

He and his students started by learning about ENIAC, and even Burick was surprised by how complex the 80-year-old computer was. They built a one-twelfth scale model to help the students better understand what it looked like. Seeing the students light up, Burick became confident in their ability to move onto the full-scale model, and he started ordering supplies.

ENIAC was composed of 40 large metal panels arranged in a U-shape that housed its many vacuum tubes, resistors, capacitors, and switches. Twenty of the panels were accumulators with the same design, so the students started with these, then worked through smaller groupings of panels. The repeating panels brought symmetry to ENIAC, Burick says, but it was also one of the main challenges of recreating it. If one part was slightly out of place, the next one would be too and the mistake would compound.

The students installed 500 simulated vacuum tubes in each of the panels here, for a total of 18,000 vacuum tubes.Robert Gamboa

Once they constructed the panels, they added ENIAC’s three function tables, which stored numerical constants in banks of switches, then two punch-card machines. Finally, they installed 18,000 simulated vacuum tubes. In total, the project used nearly 300 square meters of thick-ream cardboard, 1,600 hot-glue-gun sticks, and 7 gallons of black paint.

The scale of the machine—and his students’ work—left Burick in awe. “By the time we were done, I felt like I was in a room full of scientists,” he says.

Previously, Burick’s students built an 8-foot-long drivable Tesla Cybertruck (“complete with a 400-watt stereo system and a subwoofer”) and he plans to keep the momentum with another recreation—maybe from the Apollo moon missions.

“I go to work every day, and I feel passionate about robotics [and] technology. I get to share that passion with the students,” Burick says. “I get to feel what it’s like to be in the position of the people that helped me. It closes that loop, and I find that really rewarding.”

Brian Barrett: In terms of making things happen, so this deal’s not going to happen until later this year. It was reported recently that the reason was, then this part makes it, this is what makes most sense to me is, SpaceX is gearing up for an IPO. They’re getting close to it, and they didn’t want to close this deal because it would delay the IPO. So there’s sort of an order of operation things, like, “We need to go public before we try to close a $60 billion deal,” which again feels, like everything about these feels, I’m not going to say cursed, it just feels likely to derail at some point.

Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. The reporter in me is really excited for IPO year because I feel like this is when companies really need to get their act together.They need to have their operations, internal processes really, really, really, really dialed. You’re going public, there’s going to be a lot of scrutiny. There’s going to be a lot of shareholders. SpaceX is trying to do it. Anthropic is trying to do it. OpenAI is trying to do it. I think it’s going to be a wild, wild time, and stuff’s going to get weird along the way.

Brian Barrett: Have either of you read Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic or rather how many times have you read it?

Zoë Schiffer: Right. That’s the operative question.

Leah Feiger: I have to admit I haven’t read it, but I have read way too many things about it. Unfortunately, I feel like I’ve read it at this point.

Brian Barrett: Well, and everybody sort of should by now if you follow Palantir on X, and if you don’t, that’s OK. Just to be clear, it’s not an endorsement. But this week, Palantir on X, unprompted, nobody asked them to, but they shared a 22-point summary of Alex Karp’s book. They prefaced it with, “Because we get asked a lot, here’s the technological republic in brief.” And it goes on to list Karp’s ideal vision of tech and the state working as one. There’s some points in there, some highlights, quote, “The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.” And also quote, “No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one.” There’s one more in there that I do want to call out.

Leah Feiger: The draft? You got to talk about the draft.

Brian Barrett: The draft is a good one. I was going to go with, “Some cultures have produced vital advances, others remain dysfunctional and regressive.”

Leah Feiger: Yes. It’s hard to not read every single point of this manifesto out loud. By saying strong reactions ensued, though we’re kind of missing the big one, which is critics online called this fascist. They were like, “You are just giving us the point-by-point of Palantir’s dissent into fascism basically.” We spend a lot of time talking about this company. We don’t really talk a lot about its origins and how it views itself in the entire American dream or whatever that means. It was founded after 9/11. It was supposed to be after this big national consensus where fighting terrorism abroad was the be-all, end-all. The company was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel. Data aggregation analysis tool powers everything from businesses to the US military’s targeting systems, and more recently, that’s meant like targeting systems specifically on immigrants. So the way that CEO Alex Karp talks about this company as this extended arm of the US government isn’t necessarily new. I think that it’s just hitting this very specific point for critics, and critics internally as well that are going, “Wait a second, that’s not the country that I actually signed up on.” Specially this year, ICE and DHS surveillance, its support of military actions in Iran, the company has doubled down on all of these positions. We actually have a story coming tomorrow from politics reporter Makena Kelly about how internally that’s not being received super well either. And then you have Alex Karp who kind of doesn’t really appear to care, and he’s like, “No, no, no, we’re on track. We’re going to keep going here.”

Bob Iger is returning to Thrive Capital as an advisor, just one month after stepping down as CEO of Disney, a role he held for nearly two decades.

Iger previously served a two-month stint as a venture partner at the firm in late 2022, but left when the Disney board asked him to retake the helm of the media conglomerate, following his initial departure from the company in 2020.

“Bob leads with boldness and conviction because he knows what he is building and why. He is rejoining Thrive at a time when that kind of leadership matters most,” Thrive’s founder Josh Kushner posted on X.

Iger, who already owns a stake in the firm, will work with Thrive’s investment staff and portfolio founders, the Wall Street Journal reported. However, his advisory role will likely not require a full-time commitment.

Thrive manages over $50 billion in assets, according to PitchBook. In February, the firm announced that it raised $10 billion in capital commitments for its 10th fund, the largest in the firm’s 17-year history. Thrive holds significant stakes in OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX. The firm also amassed a 7% ownership stake in Cursor, whose potential sale to SpaceX could be worth about $4.2 billion, Bloomberg reported.

There is no practical benefit for Kyber developers to have chosen a PQC key-exchange algorithm. The Kyber ransom note gives victims one week to respond. Quantum computers capable of running Shor’s algorithm—the series of mathematical equations that allow the breakage of RSA and ECC (elliptic curve cryptography)—are, at a minimum, three years away and likely much further.

A Kyber variant that targets systems running VMware,  meanwhile, claims to use ML-KEM as well. Rapid7 said its look under the hood revealed that, in fact, it uses RSA with 4096-bit keys, a strength that will take even longer for Shor’s algorithm to break. Anna Širokova, a Rapid7 senior security researcher and the author of Tuesday’s post, said the use or claimed use of ML-KEM is likely just a branding gimmick and that implementing it required relatively little work by Kyber developers.

In an email, Širokova wrote:

First, it’s marketing to the victim. “Post-quantum encryption” sounds a lot scarier than “we used AES,” especially to non-technical decision-makers who might be evaluating whether to pay. It’s a psychological trick. They’re not worried about someone breaking the encryption a decade from now. They want payment within 72 hours.

Second, implementation cost is low. Kyber1024 libraries (renamed to ML-KEM) are available and well-documented. Ransomware doesn’t encrypt your files directly with Kyber1024. That would be slow. Instead, it:

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1. Generates a random AES key
2. Encrypts your files with that AES key (fast)
3. Encrypts that AES key with Kyber1024 (so only the attacker can decrypt it)

In Rust, there are already libraries that do Kyber1024. The developer just adds it to their dependencies and calls a function to wrap the key.

Despite the hype, Kyber suggests that PQC is attracting the attention of less technically inclined attorneys and executives deciding how to respond to ransom demands. Kyber developers are hoping the impression that the encryption has overwhelming strength will sway people to pay.

Some Rednote users have reported that their accounts were automatically converted from the Chinese to the international version of the website recently. One American user, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid being punished by the platform, shared a screenshot with WIRED showing that when he logged into the platform in April, a banner appeared that read “Your account is a rednote account. We have automatically redirected you to rednote.com.”

The user says he registered his account with a Chinese phone number years ago, but suspects his account was converted because of using a non-Chinese IP address. “I have never posted from China. It’s always been in the United States. Obviously, in one glance, they can see this is an American posting in English,” he says.

Looming Split

After TikTok sidestepped a US shutdown by selling a majority stake in its American business, most of the “refugees” who had fled to Rednote went back to the video app or to other platforms. Those who stayed often did so because they value reading about and talking directly with Chinese people living in China. They now worry that a corporate split could destroy what had been one of the strongest bridges between the Chinese internet and the wider world.

Jerry Liu, a Vancouver-based TikTok influencer known for sharing funny content about Rednote itself, said in a November video that he was told by staff at the company’s Shanghai office that international users should expect to see less Chinese content and more North American content in the future. “I feel frustrated. I think it’s just gonna be less fun,” he said in the video.

Rednote had tried the TikTok localization playbook before—it launched a slew of regionally focused apps roughly three years ago with names like Uniik, Spark, Catalog, Takib, habU, and S’More that each catered to specific countries outside China, but they failed to catch on. The effort could have been a lesson for the company about the value of its massive Chinese content ecosystem to people in other countries, but as is often the case, regulatory and political considerations appear to have taken priority.

“I don’t want to see Americans talking about Coachella. I did that on Instagram, I didn’t join Xiaohongshu to see Instagram,” says the American user who was recently redirected to Rednote.

Security Concerns

As Rednote goes global, the company is no doubt looking to Chinese predecessors like WeChat and TikTok for ideas about how to navigate the minefield of content moderation and data privacy. So far, its approach looks to more closely resemble that of WeChat.

For over a decade, WeChat has sorted users based largely on one criterion: whether they used a Chinese or a foreign number to sign up. That has allowed users to cross Tencent’s digital border by unlinking and relinking their WeChat accounts to different mobile numbers.

Jeffrey Knockel, an assistant professor of computer science at Bowdoin College, found that Tencent censors content on WeChat and Weixin differently, even though the two platforms are integrated with one another and users can communicate across them. He says Chinese users are subject to a real-time keyword-matching filter to censor politically sensitive speech, but “if you registered for WeChat using a Canadian or an American phone number, your messages aren’t necessarily under that kind of censorship.”

Knockel says WeChat’s blended content moderation approach may have made some people wary about using the app. “Users are generally distrustful of the platform. They don’t know if they’re being watched and censored,” he says. As Rednote moves in a similar direction, it will be worth watching whether international audiences end up having similar misgivings.

This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

Anthropic is expanding its directory of connected services for its Claude AI chatbot. The platform can now link up with your accounts on AllTrails, Audible, Booking.com, Instacart, Intuit Credit Karma, Intuit TurboTax, Resy, Spotify, StubHub, Taskrabbit, Thumbtack, TripAdvisor, Uber, Uber Eats and Viator. Additional services will be added in the future.

More and more AI companies are trying to up their third-party integrations in a pitch to make their services as useful as possible. The benefit of having multiple apps connected means that a chatbot can theoretically execute more complicated tasks on your behalf. This expansion takes that capability from the professional and educational settings, where Anthropic’s connectors have been focused for the past year, to a personal one. So, for instance, Claude can now help plan a hike on AllTrails and then pull up a Spotify playlist that will last for the duration of your trek.

Anthropic noted that it is also reframing how apps are showing up so that an appropriate service is suggested for the task you want to perform. The apps should appear dynamically within the Claude conversation rather than needing a user to swipe between programs. As with most AI actions, Claude is supposed to check with its user before actually taking any actions like securing a reservation or making a purchase.

Oppo has announced its flagship camera smartphone, the Find X9 Ultra, but how does it compare to Apple’s iPhone 17 Pro Max?

Although we haven’t specifically reviewed the Max model, we have reviewed the iPhone 17 Pro so we’ll draw on our experiences there whenever applicable. 

Read on to see what’s the difference between the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and the iPhone 17 Pro Max, and to decide which handset will suit you best.

Once you’re finished here, make sure you visit our Oppo Find X9 Ultra vs Find X9 Pro to see how Oppo’s flagships compare. Finally, our list of the best Android phones, best camera phones and best smartphones will undoubtedly have your next purchase solved.

Price and Availability

The Oppo Find X9 Ultra is the first of Oppo’s Ultra models to see a global launch. However, at the time of writing, we don’t have the exact pricing or release date for the UK. 

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In comparison, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is readily available to buy now and has a starting price of £1199/$1199. Considering the Oppo Find X9 Pro has a similar starting price of £1099, we expect this means the more premium Ultra will be more expensive than the iPhone 17 Pro Max – however that’s speculation at this point.

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Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 vs A19 Pro

One of the biggest differences between the Find X9 Ultra and iPhone 17 Pro Max is with their respective chips. While the Find X9 Ultra runs on Qualcomm’s flagship Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is powered by Apple’s own A19 Pro chip. 

The iPhone 17 Pro also runs on Apple’s A19 Pro chip, and we found the handset offers brilliant performance across both day-to-day use and in our benchmark tests too. We also concluded the iPhone 17 Pro copes well with games too, although if that’s a necessity for your handset then you’ll be better off checking our best gaming phones guide instead. 

Unsurprisingly, we found that the Oppo Find X9 Pro also offers a brilliant performance too. In fact, we especially found that the handset does a great job with ray-traced gaming too – something worth keeping in mind if you’d prefer not to opt for a gaming-specific handset. Not only that, but Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 ensures everything runs smoothly and quickly too.

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Oppo Find X9 Ultra has five rear cameras

Arguably the reason to choose the Oppo Find X9 Ultra is due to its mighty camera set-up. Created in collaboration with Hasselblad, the aptly titled Hasselblad Master Camera System is made up of five rear lenses, including dual Hasselblad 200MP main and 3x telephoto lens. In fact, the latter boasts the largest sensor of its kind and can be fitted with the 300mm Explorer Teleconverter that delivers a 300m focal length and 13x optical zoom too.

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There are also two 50MP cameras which are flanked by a True Color Camera for natural colour rendition too.

In addition, the Find X9 Ultra is fitted with Oppo’s “most advanced cinematic capabilities to date”, and can not only deliver 4K60fps Dolby Vision HDR recording, but also captures 4K120fps via the Dual Hasselblad 200MP cameras too.

Oppo Find X9 Ultra

iPhone 17 Pro

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Overall, we were blown away by the Find X9 Ultra’s photography capabilities, and concluded that its vibrant capture and multiple lenses “easily challenges Apple” for the best camera phone crown.

That’s not to say the iPhone 17 Pro Max is a slouch by any means, with its trio of rear lenses able to cope well with most lighting conditions and provide a brilliant detailed finish. While we haven’t reviewed the Pro Max, the iPhone 17 Pro has the same lenses on board and boasts the best zoom lens we’ve seen on an Apple flagship. 

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Oppo Find X9 Ultra supports faster charging 

Like many of the best Android phones, the Find X9 Ultra supports exceptionally fast charging speeds – but only when paired with a compatible charger. So, while the iPhone 17 Pro Max supports 40W wired speeds and 25W MagSafe, the Find X9 Ultra boasts significantly faster numbers.

In fact, the Find X9 Ultra supports a whopping 100W SuperVOOC wired and 50W AirVOOC speeds. However, just keep in mind that you will need to purchase adapters separately to benefit from those speeds.

Oppo Find X9 Ultra has an IP66, IP68 and IP69 ratings

Durability is important when it comes to buying a phone and, fortunately, the Find X9 Ultra isn’t taking any chances. Not only does it sport the same IP68 rating as the iPhone 17 Pro Max, which means its dust-tight and can survive water submersion, but it also benefits from an IP66 and IP69 rating too. That means the handset can withstand high pressure and high temperature water jets too.

However, do keep in mind that the iPhone 17 Pro Max’s IP68 rating realistically offers more than enough protection for everyday use. Just think about how often your phone will really be subjected to water jets.

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Oppo Find X9 Ultra has a 144Hz display

The 6.9-inch iPhone 17 Pro Max is fitted with Apple’s ProMotion technology, which means the panel has a LTPO-enabled 1-120Hz refresh rate that helps make animations, scrolling and gaming feel smooth. In comparison, the slightly smaller 6.82-inch Find X9 Ultra boasts up to a 144Hz refresh rate. 

Oppo Find X9 Ultra

iPhone 17 Pro

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Otherwise, the Find X9 Ultra is equipped with an AMOLED, QHD+ display that we found to be “impossible to fault”. Similarly, the iPhone 17 Pro Max is equipped with a Super Retina XDR (OLED), HDR display.

Early Verdict

Deciding between the Oppo Find X9 Ultra and iPhone 17 Pro Max will mainly boil down to two factors: whether you’re cemented in either the Android or iOS ecosystem and whether you want an especially versatile camera phone. While the iPhone 17 Pro Max is undoubtedly a versatile camera phone, the five rear lenses of the Find X9 Ultra and the optional teleconverter undoubtedly offer more flexibility.

Some people learning the noble art of electronics find the jump from simpler tools like Fritzing to more complex ones, such as KiCAD, a little daunting, especially since they need to learn at least two tools. Fritzing is great for visualising your breadboard layout, but what if you want to start from a proper schematic, make a prototype on a breadboard and then design a custom PCB? Well, with the Kicad-breadboard plugin for (you guessed it!) KiCAD, you can now do all of this in the same tool.

Originally designed to support EE students at the University of Antwerp, the tool presents you with a virtual breadboard with configurable size and style, along with a list of components and tools that can be placed. A few clicks and parts can be placed on the virtual breadboard with ease. Adding wires is the next logical step to make those connections that operate in the horizontal dimension. Finally, assigning power supplies and probe connections completes the process. It’s a simple enough tool to draw stuff, but drawing a layout is no use if you can’t verify it’s correctness. This is where this plugin shines: it can perform an ERC (check) between the schematic and the breadboard and flag up what you missed. Add to this that you can also perform an ERC at the schematic level, before even thinking about layout, and it’s pretty hard to make an error. Now, you can transfer this directly to a real breadboard, or even a veroboard, for more permanence once you have confidence in correctness. This will definitely save time correcting errors and help keep the magic smoke safely contained within those mysterious black rectangles.

As it stands, the tools are limited to a few select ICs, which, much to this scribe’s disappointment, did not include the venerable 555 timer; however, it would be possible to work around that with some imagination at the schematic level. The ability to drop in and document power supply, function generator, and oscilloscope probing points is nice, enabling one to close the loop on documenting a layout to make it truly transferable to physical reality.

We cover electronics prototyping with breadboards a lot because they’re accessible. Here’s a super simple computer on a breadboard. We also like seeing them integrated as tools, like here. Finally, why stick with the tired old common breadboard shapes when you could make your own?