Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard?

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

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

Every society needs its rituals.

Occasionally I do prototypes with AWG 30 magnet wire and perf board.

Most recently with a tiny QFN thing that I wanted to test out.

It's pretty quick and they're fairly robust. The soldering iron removes the insulation so it's guaranteed there are no nicks.

You can get little solder pots from China for about $20. I put a thermocouple on one to set it up precisely for such purposes. I won't let it run attended though. Oh, it's 240V if that matters.

Good ones (eg. Plato- (&American Beauty?)) are more expensive.

-sp

"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.

Yeah, the Radio Shack breadboards (and a hacksaw so I can use 'em up an inch or two at a time) are useful.

One can always spread the leads out: TO-92 transistor would plug in as C--B-E or you can ground (or emitter-bond) that intermediate, to control Miller capacitance. And, if you get some silver-plated wire of the right diameter (0.020 inch, 24 gage is good), it's a bit better than dismal at making connections.

On an educational note, some lessons on connector reliability and no-clean flux are easily learned with this wiring scheme...

Belden calls their solder-through wire "Beldsol"; a hot iron makes the (polyester?) coating into flux.

There's a dead-bug system, with Beldsol wire spooled from a wire-wrap type handtool, that works wonderfully well: Vector called it "solder-wrap". I made my own handtools when the commercial one broke... using a sewing machine bobbin for the feed, and hypodermic-style SS tube (deburred) for the wire-feed.

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

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I sometimes will use wire wrap sockets (with DIP IC's) but over copper clad and use solder to connect. The wire leads are nice and stiff. I bend lit tle feet on the ones that get grounded and plunk them down on the copper cl ad first. The advantage is that I can try swapping IC's.. and also if the magic smoke comes out of one it's easy to replace. (after fixing circuit bo o boo.) But I didn't invent this.. I read of it somewhere??

George H.

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.

layed

hand.

then,

In the late 1960s i remember ICS, Daisy and Mentor systems that would do board layout. Rather expensive though, about %50K for the base workstation (often 2901 based) as much more for the software, another chunk $70k for the photo plotter (Gerber compatible). All plus an expensive person or two to drive it. And about $1k/month HW and SW maintenance contracts to keep it running. They did 4-layer and 6-layer boards or IC layouts with different and more expensive software.

My dad was a EE and got all the trade rags there were lots of ads.

And Chart-Pack. But the really good ones were made by Bishop Graphics. The Bishop people were real SOBs; their prices were outrageous and they'd show up and tell you that your decals wouldn't be shipped unless you ordered your blueprint supplies from them too.

Peple happily dumped them when CAD got affordable.

Are you sure about your timeframe? Was the 2901 even around in the late

Wikipedia - "Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits (ICs) created in

I think CAD for anyone but the really large companies didn't happen until nearly 1980 give or take a couple of years. We had a couple of

I used one today. It came with an Arduino kit. They are total crap. Don't use them unless you can tolerate bad connections and absurd amounts of stray capacitance.

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru you guys are.

There used to be stick-on "pcb tracks" that were used for RF work. They looked like 1.6mm single sided PCB say 0.25" wide and 6" long with a single track just wide enough to form a 50ohm transmission line when the PCB was stuck onto a ground plane.

Chopping them into squares obviously gives an ad-hoc isolated "pad" that can be stuck wherever convenient.

Do these still exist, and what's the name?

Here is what mine look like:

I've still got a drawer full of Bishop Graphics and Chart-Pack stuff, with DIPs in 2x and 4x sizes. (I'm saving 'em for "collector's items". Now all I have to do is find the right collector...)

In the Good Old Days, you'd make a scaled-up layout on mylar, then take it to a professional photography place with a "process camera": a huge bellows-type camera mounted on rails, with a lens about 6 inches in diameter. Then for a mere $50-100 they'd do a reduction to 1x that you could use to expose your silk screens for production. High tech!

Best regards,

Bob Masta DAQARTA v7.60 Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis

Well, 'guru' is a bit strong to describe my microwave skills, at least. ;) I mostly use microwave transistors at much lower frequency, because some of them have remarkable properties, like effectively infinite Early voltage or 300-pV 1-Hz noise. Response out to 20 GHz is a bug rather than a feature in that sort of use, sort of like an audio amp with response out to a megahertz.

It's all about finding the right ferrite bead to knock their bandwidth down to something vaguely reasonable. Murata BLM18BA and BB are good.

Occasionally I've made DIY stripboards for SC70ish parts, using several Dremel cutoff discs mounted on one arbor, with nylon washers in between. Gets old pretty fast.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs