Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard?

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those conveniently located vias. lol

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Rick
Reply to
rickman
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sometimes.

This stuff. "multicomp n254-899" stripboard

available from farnell(etc), and occasionally resold on amazon.

It's tinned, so solders more easily than the bare copper stripboards giving a reliable joint more easily.

element14.co.nz and ".au" seem to have it heavily discounted today.

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Reply to
Jasen Betts

Like the flexible Werner von Braun, according to Tom Lehrer:

"You too can be a big hero / Just learn to count backwards to zero. 'Once the rockets go up / who cares where they come down? That's not my department' / says Werner von Braun"

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Perf board is way too slow, I find--it takes at least twice as long as dead-bug when both methods apply. All that cutting and stripping of wires takes ages, and wire-wrap wire is too easy to nick.

Also the thickness of the board takes up vertical space that's very useful for making connections. With dead bug, you just use clipped-off component leads for hookup wire, and you can easily get three vertical layers of connections without shorts.

One layer is pins bent directly down to the package (e.g. shorting pins

2 and 6 of an op amp follower), the next is where the leads neck down, and the top one arches over that one. You can make the layout pretty tight if you use the bodies of resistors and capacitors to force the wires apart.

So I use perf board only rarely. When I do, it's Vector 8007 (pad-per-via plus ground plane).

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Werner is said to be the origin of

"One experiment is worth a thousand expert opinions."

which is the email sigfile of a Fellow of United Technologies.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

Pease the jester put that tangle on the cover of his book. It posses a certain charismatic enthralling aspect that draws me into its blooming crazy. :)

It reminds me of the open air boardless circuit that used to hang on an old boss' wall as abusive art. Imagine, if you will, a perfboard circuit minus the perfboard with lots of stiff wire "tracers" to keep everything in place.

The stiff wire tracers were generally kept strictly horizontal and vertical, which lent an air of respectability to the tangle. The art was voice activated. It made obnoxious sounds - chirping and doing what not when one spoke. It was the audio equivalent of rolling one's eyes. It was unsettling and kept employees such as me on the defensive, to the delight of my boss, no doubt.

But, it was also art. It was fun to look at.

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Don Kuenz
Reply to
Don Kuenz

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand. And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people to work for glory.)

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

Don't know about 5, but 6 is very doable, see my other post...

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

When I was designing marine radios, we would build a breadboard on a piece of plywood, using small PCB's representing sub-systems and stages. Typically, one to four engineers and maybe 3 technicians would contribute to the prototype construction. Artistic value and neatness varied, but the final result usually worked quite well. For many years, one such working plywood prototype was hanging on the wall of the lab (the only safe place), permanently wired to a power supply and antenna. It was very commonly used as a "reference" radio for comparison with current production units. When something went wrong, it was a big help. Anyone borrowing parts from the breadboard were threatened with violence, so it remained functional for at least 5 years.

This will require some explanation. I was temporarily in hospital with a sprained ankle, torn ligaments, and a possible concussion. After the first day, I became seriously bored. A friend delivered my box of junk parts, a soldering iron, some small tools, and ordered me to build something. The best I could do was a hat band, the remains of which is in the picture. Solder and wire leads do not tolerate much flexing, which caused the hatband to break. It may not look like much, but as I was seeing double at the time, soldering all that junk together was a real challenge.

I've built quite a few multi-layer 3D type circuits. However, I always have built them on a piece PCB to provide the necessary support. I also have a fair collection of 22M resistors, which I use for standoffs and mechanical support.

The uglier the breadboard, the better it works.

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Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

A friend *always* "air wired" (simple) things. I think he enjoyed the three-dimensional puzzle aspect of it ("Hmmm... how can I get this component to bridge these two points in space?").

When done, he would wrap the circuit in toilet paper (!) and stuff it in a tin can.

Different strokes...

Reply to
Don Y

Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?

Reply to
Robert Baer

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s "Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of

74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand. These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then, although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

Yeah, PCB layout back then was supported by... I can't think of the name of the company that made those pads and strips. They made them with scale factors so you could more easily see what you were doing, 2x and

4x that I recall. You set your design rules by picking the tape width and the pad diameter. If you were a little tight and wanted to shave a little off a pad... you shaved a little off a pad. lol

I didn't do layout then, but I've seen the artwork. Xacto knives are your friends even if it is just for picking up the tracks and pads and placing them.

I don't think CAD systems were used much even for layout until around the time the PC hit the scene. I guess the big companies had them... with "huge" 20" CRTs and light pens most likely. Don't know for sure.

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Rick
Reply to
rickman

I used to lay out my own boards, decals and black crepe tape on pin-aligned mylar. There would be a padmaster (pads only) and a separate sheet for each trace layer. We sent it out to Lorry Ray in Mountain View to be photographed. They could also do cool ground plane tricks, all with wet photography. We'd send the film out to the fab house and expect to get it back.

I still have a few layouts around, to show the kids. It was labor intensive.

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D sound system.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
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Reply to
John Larkin

I've wrapped several of my projects in toilet paper and stuffed them.

Reply to
John S

Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly different from the rest of the posts.

Reply to
John S

Every society needs its rituals.

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John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

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Reply to
John Larkin

"One man's garbage is another man's treasure."

It's an electronics group. One can expect discussions about breadboards, SPICE, and Pease to surface from time to time. Those things are on topic.

*I* am interested and that's why I posted the question in the first place. Everyone else can (and will) speak for themselves.
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Don Kuenz
Reply to
Don Kuenz

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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Principal Consultant 
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Reply to
Phil Hobbs

Brady?

We used 1:1 on a lathe sort of cutter. The white/black copy was mounted to one drum and copper-clad mounted to a second drum. A light/photocell and audio amplifier then drove a solenoid with a knife blade to make the copy on the copper-clad sheet as the lathe turned.

Yep. I did a lot of it in college.

I last used the tape method when I graduated. Everything at the PPoE was done with CAD after that (long before the PC). The early CAD was pretty crude, though. The graphical tools were quite limited until, perhaps, '76 or so. Everything was done with text netlists before that but there was no tape and hadn't been for some time.

Reply to
krw

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