If you're into building your own electronics, having a vast array of prototyping skills and tricks is incredibly useful. The urge to build something doesn't always happen when it's convenient or when you have just the right materials. Here's a collection of useful methods and tricks for building circuit boards.
Some things are common to all the various ways to build circuits. Any way to connect parts that satisfy the common necessities will result in a working circuit. Some of the critical items are:
You have to interconnect the parts correctly
You have to mechanically support the parts. Usually, the part leads themselves are NOT enough to hold the whole mess of parts together all by themselves (as in the Hanging Garden style) and you have to have some way to hold the bodies of the parts firmly. While the leads support the parts on PCB's and other board-style setups, they don't support all the other parts as well - the board does the heavy duty holding, while the leads just hold the one part to the board.
You have to have some way of supporting connections to parts that are not physically close to the circuit - for instance panel mounted jacks and pots. I refer to these as "off-board connections"
You have to be able to mount the circuit inside some kind of enclosure for all but the most temporary, bench top testing. This usually means some kind of supporting board for the circuit with holes in it so you can screw it to supports, but may mean some kind of edge guides as well.
I'll refer to "nodes" - a node is a connection between two or more components. If two resistors are connected together in series, the connection between the two of them is a node. If a transistor base is connected to the junction of the two resistors, it's still just one node. For most circuits, lots of things connect to power and ground. The power supply point is one node with lots of things connected to it. Same for ground.
Breadboard
From the true, original meaning. Get a piece of wooden board, lay out the parts in the arrangement that they actually fit well on the board, then drive a small nail at each "node". Wrap the leads around the nails, trim and solder the leads to the nails. The nails provide mechanical stability for the connections, the board holds the whole assembly together. The earliest "breadboarded" circuits were actually built this way, on an actual kitchen cutting board, and it's where we get the term "bread board" for prototype circuits.
Notice that if you use a thin piece of something like 1/8" luan plywood and brass brads, this can actually be a very useful technique. You could do a very workable simple circuit this way. I'm thinking of making a Fuzz Face clone in this style just to take it's picture.
Also note that while Breadboard can accommodate anything with an extended lead, parts like integrated circuits which are pre-clipped for printed circuit use are very difficult to include. You could, of course, wire up an IC socket with small wires going to one nail/node per IC pin in a partial use of the Dead Bug technique noted later, but there are better ways to breadboard with IC's. |
