When you sketch a circuit with solder and tinned wire, you are already building it !

#79 #SystemsThatMatter #PerfBoard

When building electronics project for permanent use - i.e. after testing on a solderless breadboard - you normally go to a #soldered perforated board of some type as a #prototype, or even for very-low-volume production.

There are different types of boards. I dislike "matrix" boards, which are just isolated pads on a grid, i.e. there are no connections between any of them. Some people swear by these; I swear at them.

I prefer protoboards that have multiple holes per pad (so you can connect multiple component leads without having to add an explicit wire jumper). If they've also got #busses - sets of pads that run the whole length or width of the board - so much the better!

Some are #crap: laminated paper PCBs where the pads lift off the board if you even try to desolder something you added. Row/column labels missing, or (like I found with some recently) that don't line up between the front and back of the board 😆 , or most egregiously, they don't actually show the pad pattern on the front of the board, so you have to keep flipping it to check your parts are correctly placed. One example below.

I have some from "BusBoard Prototype Systems" that I like. The SB4 is a 38 x 24 (912 hole) board that is #snappable into quarters. Two of the quarters have rows that are 4-hole, 2-hole, 4-hole. The other two are 5 2-hole pads. Both types have a single bus running along each of the 2 long sides.

But ...

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#electronics #hobby #ProtoBoard #PerfBoard #MatrixBoard #Chinesium