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Jumperlink: A Smarter Way to Connect Electronics

Jumperlink is a board designed to make electronic connections easier to set up, maintain, and share compared to traditional jumper wires.

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If you’ve ever spent more time untangling spaghetti-mess jumper wires than actually building circuits, you’re not alone. Breadboards + jumper wires are great for getting started, but they come with a bunch of annoying realities: loose connections, fragile wires, confusing layouts, fragile setups weeks later, and that inevitable moment where you sigh and say, “I have to rebuild this?” Enter Junperlink — a configurable, FPGA-powered connection board that replaces messy jumpers with software-defined links. No more guessing which wire goes where. No more lost connections. Just clean, reliable routing at up to 150 MHz. Why Junperlink? Traditional jumper wires: fall out during debugging degrade after repeated plugging/unplugging clutter your workspace when circuits aren’t simple are nearly impossible to document or reproduce become consumables you can never keep track of Junperlink was designed to solve these problems, giving you a smarter way to link circuits without spaghe

Most electronic engineers or hobbyists have used jumper wires, particularly when starting their first projects with a breadboard. This is quite good for quick prototyping.Students and hobbyists can easily modify circuits to see how changes affect behavior, which is invaluable for understanding electronics principles hands-on.

but then you definitely will find out the notable disadvantages, such as unreliable connections during debugging and testing. It is exhilarating when starting a project. However, frustration inevitably creeps in when you discover that your system isn't working because a wire is loose, or you need to reassemble it after a few weeks, struggling to remember how to reconstruct your project. The most discouraging part is realizing that a project built with jumper wires is delicate and messy. I give up, those are the final words when that day eventually comes.

I have to spend hours to rebuild below project when I need to do a simple test:

Let's carefully recall our minds and list all the issues for the jumper wires:

1, Jumper wires are easy to lose connection after certain times of plugging in and out.

2, Jumper wires are NOT suitable for high speed

3, Jumper wires are NOT friendly for debugging, NOT friendly for signal testing with oscilloscope probes.

4, Jumper wires are good for very simple projects, but they become messy when more  cables are added in.

5, Jumper wires are hard to set up when more than 10 wires have to be used

6, Jumper wires are fragile and have to be handled very carefully when moving a project setup from one place to another.

7, Jumper wires are tough to maintain the settings, especially need to be re-set up several weeks later.

8, Jumper wires are consumables, and you will find there are no cables available in your drawers after a certain time no matter how many you have bought, you have to borrow some wires from another project, which is carefully stored in your cabinet. This again makes you headache when you have to re-set up “another project” in the future.

9 Other issues, for example, the head pin of jumper wires accidentally touches a PCB and gets the PCB board spike.

So, is there any other option to overcome the shortages listed above? What alternatives are available for replacing jumper wires? 

The answer was NO when I searched it over the internet. 

As an electronic engineer, I thought this was quite a good point for me if I could design a board to fix most problems listed above and that's where my solution comes in—I've developed a new board called the "JumperLink."

What is a Jumperlink?

A Jumperlink is a board with a FPGA on and provides a configurable switch function for external connections. 

A diagram will be much more useful than any words.

The basic idea comes from my experience using jumper wires. Any one wire will be connected to power or a signal. so I asked myself if I could make a connector with any pin that can be configured as a power output or signal input/output by software, then it is able to be used to connect most external devices. those external devices which are easy to purchase from online, such as from sparkfun or aliexpress etc. 

As shown in the picture, Jumperlink has one FPGA in the middle and 20 pins on both left and right sides which is symmetrical in design. a multiplexer is added to each pin between FPGA and connectors, which makes each pin of the board able to be connected to 5V, 3.3V, signal and Ground. All signals are connected to a FPGA in which all of them are able to be configured from software. 3.3V and 5V are selected because they are the most common power in the embedded world.

this is the PCB I completed: 

More details about Jumperlink

Jumperlink includes many useful features. Below is a summary of the key highlights:

1, Board size: 180 mm × 25.4 mm

2, Uses standard 2.54 mm pitch headers/connectors 

3. Provides...

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  • Another Jumperlink Example

    dylan zheng02/23/2026 at 14:48 0 comments

    Another Jumperlink Example

    (I²C OLED Demo)

    In this example, I’ll demonstrate how Jumperlink handles an I²C bus setup.

    The module used here is an SSD1306 128×64 0.91" OLED display (I²C version) — a common and inexpensive module easily available from AliExpress and other online suppliers.

    This OLED module exposes four signals:

    • VCC
    • GND
    • SCL (I²C Clock)
    • SDA (I²C Data)

    To make the comparison fair, I first built the test setup using traditional jumper wires.

    The running result is:

    Then I rebuilt the setup using Jumperlink instead of traditional jumper wires.

    The signal mapping is configured as follows:

    • R4 → SDA signal (from pin 3 of connector J8 on the I/O board)
    • R6 → SCL signal (from pin 5 of J8)
    • R10 → GND (from pin 9 of J8)

    On the left side of Jumperlink, pins L13, L15, L17, and L19 are assigned and connected to the OLED module (VCC, GND, SCL, SDA).

    In this example, we also need UART console access for debugging:

    • TXD (pin 8 of J8)
    • RXD (pin 10 of J8)

    Since connector J8 is now occupied by Jumperlink, those UART signals can no longer be accessed directly from the original header. Instead of running extra jumper wires, I simply re-linked them internally within Jumperlink and routed them to different available pins on the left side — in this case, L1 (TXD) and L3 (RXD).

    No rewiring. No signal conflict. Just reconfiguration.

    Below is the fully linked circuit configuration.

    The running result is:

    The final wiring is clean, compact, and easy to follow.

    As demonstrated, Jumperlink fundamentally improves how two modules are interconnected. It removes cable clutter and replaces it with a structured, software-defined configuration. Connections become faster to set up, easier to maintain, and far simpler to document and share with others.

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