Adafruit Swirly Aluminum Mounting Grid for 0.1 Spaced PCBs

With most of our dev boards, sensors and feathers now sporting plug-and-play stemma QT ports it can be very fast to put together projects with half a dozen boards snapped together. But that ease of use has one downside: now you don’t have a breadboard as a mechanical substrate… which is why we created this nifty swirly grid design to allow for easy mounting of various small microcontrollers and sensor boards.

The grid is made out of an ‘aluminium PCB’ – we have that in quotes because while technically it is made with a PCB process for single-sided aluminium-core PCBs, there’s no actual copper on here, it’s just the aluminium backing, and then black solder mask with silkscreen. The aluminium is conductive both electrically and thermally – so watch out if you are using metal screws to attach stuff. Unless, that is, you want to turn the whole thing into a ground plane in which case: go for it.

Each square is 0.6′ x 0.6′ and there are holes or slots every 0.2 inches. With the various dots and dashes, you can pretty much make anything on a 0.1′ grid fit. Each drill hole is 0.1′ / 2.54mm diameter, and the slots are 0.11′ x 0.3′ (2.75 x 7.5mm) if that’s not good enough, the aluminium is easy to cut/drill/machine/bend if you need more customisation.

Note: Adafruit boards are NOT included.

Specifications

• 0.062′ thick aluminium plate
• For 0.1′ grid mounting projects
• 3′ x 6′ dimensions
• Wanna make your own? KiCad Python script grid generator is available here for making any size your desire!