Grounded Feet
A quicker and dirtier version of Dots just does a Hanging Garden, but every lead that goes to ground is taken straight down to the ground plane and soldered. The ground leads hold the whole Hanging Garden up off the copper clad and give it a little rigidity. This is probably OK for quick prototyping, but not good for permanent use unless you pour some casting resin over it for permanent mechanical support.
Cardboard
This is one trick that another web site promoted. You do a layout of the parts, as straightforward from the schematic or as extensively and compactly folded as you like (and can follow!), then print the layout on paper. The layout is glued to a piece of thin cardboard, and the component leads simply poked through the cardboard, using a needle or nail if you need help making holes. The leads are then bent together and soldered, very much as in a hanging garden or perfboard styles. Cardboard prototyping can be viewed as a somewhat improved Hanging Garden, or a cheesy, insubstantial perfboard - it's about halfway between them. This is another style where you really have to use some sort of fixative for long term stability, with casting resin or some such. Note that there are some problems here - cardboard absorbs moisture from the air very quickly, and laser printing is slightly conductive, so that circuits with high impedances, like JFET, CMOS or MOSFET devices and IC's, maybe even Darlington transistors, may act strangely on wet days, or when flexed. Casting the whole mess up in resin should seal it permanently, though, so you're only left with the conduction through the layout printing to worry about.
Point to Point
Like Breadboard, Point to Point is a very old technique. In PTP, you use terminal strips to mechanically secure the nodes of the circuit, placing a terminal strip wherever you need one and using insulated wires to go longer distances than component leads. This can produce VERY high quality results if done with care. However, it's big, bulky, and mechanically difficult (drilling and riveting those terminal strips in). It's often thought of as the ultimate vacuum tube technique, though. Maybe not so good for effects. Completely intolerant of IC's except for the trick of using a partial Dead Bug section to paste in an IC.
Eyelet/Turret Board
Another holdover from vacuum tube days is the combined Eyelet/Turret board. In this form of building, an insulating substrate, like glass-epoxy, phenolic-paper, or rubberized fiber board is fitted with either brass eyelets or pressed-in machined turrets as places to form soldered nodes. This is the standard method that Fender used for all of its vacuum tube amplifiers until modern economics forced them into printed circuit boards. The military was the user of most of the turret board assemblies, which tended to be made on thick (1/8" or 3.5mm) glass epoxy boards. The turrets stick up above the surface of the board and make it very easy and fast to wind the component leads once around a turret and snip the lead to length. Additional interconnection between turrets and external controls, etc., is done with wires. Eyelet board is an even faster way to build, just stick the component leads through the eyelet hole and snip to length. However, eyelet board is not as robust mechanically, each solder joint not having that stabilizing wind around the terminal to steady it. Neither Eyelet nor Turret Board is particularly good for effects, but they're great if you're building tube amps - particularly if you can make or buy your own turret boards.
Again, completely intolerant of IC's except for Dead-Bugging a partial section.
Plugboard
Plugboard is a much more modern update of point to point or breadboard. These are the common "experimenter's strips" you see made of white plastic. They have a central split just wide enough to accept the typical legs of a Dual Inline Package (DIP) IC, and rows of five holes running outwards from that. Each group of five holes is connected together by a strip of metal contacts inside the plastic, and the holes and contacts are set up so you can just push the common component leads into the hole and have connections between the leads - that is, every row of five holes is a potential node.
Wiring up circuits on plugboard is fast, effective, and an outstanding way to try new circuits. It's also incredibly UN-reliable, as the twisting of leads in the holes, sprung contacts and general haywired-ness of circuits on plugboard mean that they'll only work for short periods of time, and there is no good way to solidify them - unless you want to pour resin all over your plugboard! This is usually the best way to test circuits or sections of circuits before committing to a final soldered-down prototype, though. Very good at the limited thing it does well.
Plugboard is a natural match for Dual Inline Packaged (DIP) IC's.
Perfboard
This and strip board is where nearly everyone starts. Perfboard is usually phenolic-paper or glass-epoxy sheet, maybe 1/16" (about 1.5 to 2mm) thick, and drilled with a matrix of holes on a rectangular grid, often 0.1" (2.54mm) centers. With perfboard, you just stick the component leads through the holes and then bend, twist, and trim leads to make nodes. When all the nodes are soldered and trimmed, the board is done. Perfboard is forgiving, mechanically stable, and can be very reliable. It approaches the permanence of printed circuit board, and is a great prototyping technique. In fact, about the only drawback of perfboard compared to printed circuit board is that you'll be tempted to make another one - and then it hits you: each perfboard is a separate work of art, with custom bent leads and wiring. I find that I can only stand to make about two of any one thing on perfboard. However, if you're only ever going to make one, perfboard is a good choice.
Some perfboards have a copper pad around each hole. If you can get this stuff, it is a full notch superior to ordinary perfboard, as you can hold parts in place by just soldering the lead to the pad around the hole it pokes through.
Perfboard with rows/columns on 0.1"/2.5mm spacing is a natural match for IC's. |
