Wire Wrap Technology

Then how would one prototype something that clearly exceeds the confines of a breadboard?

What about changes to a prototype? Isn't wire wrap much easier to make changes to than a PCB?

..Chuck..

I use wirewrap with protoboard, instead of soldering lead to lead.

PCB costs too damned much for the sort of hobbyist foolishness I do.

I find some at Digikey.com catalogue page 326 I was also browsing around for some ... :-)

Go directly to pcb. Wirewrap isn't suitable for lots of stuff anyway ( e.g. power electronics ). Otherwise simulate.

If you plan on making lots of mistakes it has that advantage ! ;-)

Graham

I usually use wire wrap for breadboarding, and also if I am only making one of something for a customer. You can still find lots of wire wrap items at JDR Microdevices at

Brian

Yup.

Graham

Over her in UK wirewrap is almost gone, but we still use it for some of our test equipment. It has the advantage of being able to implement major changes when the customer (with our help) eventually figures out what he really needs, having delivered what he asked for "on time, to budget". I get wire and sockets from RS Components (rswww.com) and Farnell (partnered/owns Newark in US). Tools can be obtained from OK Industries, but are expensive - although a hand wrap tool can make 8000 wraps before wearing out (from personal experience). For power, 26awg can be used. If doubled, a few amps can be passed. More than that - solder a fat wire. If you're interested, I've developed a program which simplifies the wirelist generation, and checks for duplicate pins/names, non-existant pins (pin 20 of a 14 pin device), split nets, and produces a reverse view of the card for inspection. It's not optimised for user friendliness (!) but I find is useful. hth Neil

It has gone out of fasion but you can still get parts from a few suppliers. It's still the fastest method of building one off jobs subject to a few provisos.

Yes.

I was looking for some 16 pin DIP wire wrap blocks

No, breadboarding is dead, too. Think, design, check, pc board.

John

The last project I genuinely breadboarded was in 1990. It's more useful with power electronics ( which that was ).

A couple of guys I work with were quite surprised when I first suggested prototyping on a pcb. I reckon they still think it's cheating slightly !

Graham

Wire wrap is dead and so is breadboarding (well, almost) and so is hobby electronics (meaning that an individual cannot nowadays come up with something at least mildly interesting to friends and family).

SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY has taken over. Try to get some late model semiconductors and ICs with leads that one can work with and you will see what I mean.

How profoundly depressing... That is, if I were to believe you, it would be depressing. Saying that an individual cannot nowadays come up with something interesting says something about your imagination ;)

Perhaps that is true, but not with the chips I'm using. I'm currently laboring under the delusion that I can create a 16bit CPU using only TTL chips that will boot the Linux Elks kernel. I haven't had any problem finding 74ACTXX chips. I plan to do it all with wire wrap. Why?

1. A CPU is a very complicated thing and will require changes after creation no matter how carefully it is designed.
2. It's a one-off project. Printing a PCB would be a waste of time and money.
3. The only way to truly understand something is to dig into it a deeply as possible.

..Chuck..

"Chuck W." wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Nobody really breadboards either. It used to be that you made a wirewrap board to test your design. But now with simulation, DRC, peer reviews, etc, it is tough for a design flaw to get very far. With all the programable logic that is used these days, many design changes are done by reprograming a chip.

Some questions, I'm wondering what small electronics manufacturers will do with only surface mount technology. There must be a lot of companies who now assemble circuit boards manually with workers on an assembly line. I don't know much about surface mount but isn't surface mount done with expensive robots or something similar? Can the small manufacturers afford automatic equipment? I can't really see people installing surface mount components manually, at least not very well. And as long as there are small manufacturers won't there be a market for conventional style components? And as long as there is a market won't component manufacturers supply the conventional parts? What do students do in the lab if there is no breadboarding? Will oscilloscopes in the lab be obsolete when only simulators are used?

Thanks Rod

Small runs, you can do with tweezers. A few more, and a solder stencil and a manual (pantographic) pick-and-place aren't too expensive. We have power stencils and two semi-automatic p-n-p machines, where an operator places parts guided by a computer; they cost about $25K each. Full automatic p-n-p machines (some place 8 parts a second!) cost a good fraction of a megabuck and setup is complex enough that they only make sense for very large batches.

John

On 18 Jan 2006 14:18:30 -0800, via , "Chuck W." spake thusly:

Absolutely not. Much depends on your application; it sounds like you are doing low-level breadboard design, which I can't speak to. But in various applications of the telecommunications industry, wire wrap is used almost exclusively for large scale interconnections between equipment.