Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard?

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.

I use Bellin surface-mount adapters for small parts. I have a Mantis magnifier that helps enormously when soldering small stuff.

I only breadboard simple things, little subcircuits. Sometimes we'll do a 4-layer board to test one or more circuits. When I do that, I walk around and see if anyone else wants to piggy-back a circuit on the board.

It doesn't make sense to breadboard an entire product; you may as well go for the real thing, the sellable board.

Somebody here could make a home business out of making 4-layer protos for people, maybe run a panel per week and chop it up for various customers. Some sections, like adapters and filters, could be standard products, too.

It would make more sense to spray on a resist pattern and then etch.

Etching is messy and nasty, but so it trying to solder to conductive epoxy.

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.)

They even do your beloved gold finish.

You are welcome...

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

I had in mind someone who would accept sketches and scribbles, do the board layout, buy a panel, and hack it up to distribute to various customers... something more than standard PCB fab from Gerbers.

Sure, I'll do your layouts for you. Send me your scribbles.

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.

On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 01:42:49 -0400, rickman Gave us:

Yes. I am, in fact, rock steady and somewhat of a trick shot artist as I never need a bridge either and shoot ambidextrously. They should have me on TV between the pro matches.

When I eat a piece of toast I thank the Lord for the fact that I have it, and continue with my knowledge that so many here on Earth do not even get a piece of toast in a given day.

I only hope that my physical maladies, whatever they may be, do not keep me from making a contribution to (and toward) civil society.

And hope that my mental maladies do not harm anyone, like as was the case with folks like Travon Martin, and this guy...

We should come down hard on cops who have forgotten their oaths, and we should hold the failed academies they go to at fault for maligning their mindsets into this Nazi horseshit we are currently enduring. And the retarded bastards did NOTHING about the gangs OR the drugs they claimed they needed all that money and additional manpower for.

Be afraid... Be very afraid.

On Mon, 15 Sep 2014 23:25:06 -0700, Jeff Liebermann Gave us:

We have several at work, and they make our Circuit Card Test mounting fixtures for us. Embedded PEMs and lots of other features.

As to your remarks about finish, we bought pro models. I guess with the consumer grade, one gets what one pays for, and the AR-16 Receiver won't be on your list of capable 'print jobs'.

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...

you should try enamel wire, just cut to length and dip the end in a blob of solder on the iron, instant stripping

-Lasse

-Lasse

And then what, I have to order boards?

What I had in mind was a really useful service that saved me time and hassle. You know, something helpful.

There are lots of retired and hobbyist guys here that could start all sorts of interesting little businesses. Maybe they prefer golfing and going to wine tastings.

Jeff's points are out of left field. Of course the plastic used in a 3D printer won't be useful as a PCB substrate. Duh! But it is feasible to print metal onto an existing substrate. The question is *what* metal? Whatever is used has to be reasonably conductive and capable of being soldered unless a new technology for attaching components is to be developed.

Has anyone heard of anything along these lines? I see in Jeff's link they are making steel objects by laser fusing metal beads. If they could do this with copper a board could be covered with copper beads and fused where you want the tracks to remain. There would need to be some form of attachment developed to keep the copper solidly on the board. Or perhaps steel could be used as a thin base layer (again assuming an attachment can be formed) and copper plated on top. That would have possibilities, especially since the plating would give you through holes at the same time. But then plating is also a step we would like to avoid, no?

I'll order the boards too. But I will likely charge extra for crabby attitudes.

Do you have anything in the pipe?

Not today, but maybe two biggish jobs coming up. Roughly 30 discrete engineering sub-projects, some of which we could br delegated.

But I was suggesting a business, which would involve consolidating several such circuits per panel.