Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard?

Every city had a few shops with cameras like that, but they mostly did work for print shops, for newspapers and print flyers and such. They couldn't do PCB artwork photography because they couldn't hold the tolerances and didn't know the process tricks, like making ground planes from padmasters. Here in the SF area, Lorry Ray was the best. When I worked in New Orleans nobody was any good so we had to make our own camera, which was literally two rooms with a lens in the wall between them, big tracks for the art and the film.

The Big Easy: good food, good times, bad tolerances.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

I use carbide dental burrs in a Dremel, freehand, to cut away copper.

You can also put down Kapton tape and then copper tape patterns. Kinda low impedance.

I occasionally use the old metal shear to make a collection of narrow FR strips, as power busses and junction islands. They can be crazy-glued onto the copperclad ground plane.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com 
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

He might have some of the wire where the enamel is designed for burn off. It does exist.

Steve

These used to be (?still are?) available commercially, but with the track geometry chosen so they were 50 ohms transmission line when above a suitable ground plane.Very simple and convenient when making simple GHz notch filters to remove harmonics.

Anyone remember the name?

(Curiously I made a trivial dead-bug circuit like this yesterday. Synchrotonicity rules).

[...]

Wainwright, probably. No longer around.

Jeroen Belleman

So far, I've not had any bad connections unless I push wires into the holes that are too large.

I measure 2.8pF between columns. What do you consider "absurd amounts of stray capacitance"?

That said, the experimenter must determine if the physical platform is acceptable or not for his purposes.

For simple stuff, there's little to beat "dead bug" style.

There's any number of variants like hybrids between dead bug and the Manhattan and/or ugly styles favoured by some hams.

Whenever the design involves bolt on power devices, these provide some of the soldering points for everything else. Typically I'd use existing holes in a salvaged pressed sheet heatsink, punched out PCB blanks can be glued on for more solder points. Sometimes I've even been known to use tagboard for really basic stuff, small sub-assemblies on stripboard can be glued edgeways to the ali plate or secured with mounting bolts/spacers.

Basically - I just use whatever's ready to hand.

I meant push wires/pins too large for the hole which may distort the inner connection contacts such that they no longer make reliable connection with smaller wires such as resistor leads.

2.8 pF is pretty large--with a 1M resistor, that puts the corner frequency at 56.8 kHz, whereas with dead bug it'd be more like 0.12 pF, i.e. 1.32 MHz. Which is one reason why the usual wisdom is never to use those things above 50 kHz.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Ah yes, that's it; thanks.

Googling for wainwright brings up other names that rings a bell: "minimounts" and "soldermount", plus a few pictures confirming it.

notes "use copper foil tape from any stained glass supply house to form conductors like you would on a PC board. The tape is dirt cheap, has an adhesive backing, and is designed to take heat. You can cut the foil with scissors or an X-Acto knife,"

so that could probably be used on the plain side of single-sided PCB

Phil, there is another world out there that does not do what you do, and does not depend on the finesse of such things.

Well, there are lots of audio folks and people who just want to blink LEDs, if that's what you mean. ;)

Sprinkling 3 pF and 20 nH randomly among adjacent pins of an IC can do some pretty amusing things--for instance making a resonance at 70 MHz, just the thing to put some nice Q ~= 10 ringing on a logic line driven by 8 ohms.

So it isn't just bleeding edge analogue that has problems with those things.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

In his book Pease notes that repeatedly pushing jumpers into a hole can cause small pieces of solder to scrape off, pile up, and eventually create a short. In the end a nylon breadboard can be used for audio frequency prototypes as long as one keeps in mind all of its shortcomings.

--
Don Kuenz

And here's a ten piece set

Thank you. Carving islands is a great idea! Because some say that the heat from a solder gun can cause bonded islands to break loose.

Here's my breadboarding options so far, from best to worst.

Spin a board

Wire wrap or perf board

dead bug or Manhattan

nylon breadboard or strip board

--
Don Kuenz

Even better. At that price, I might get a more complete set. Thanks for the lead.

Phil, you are probably a genius. I think that may keep you from understanding that there are methods and approaches that is beneath your grasp. I am just tired of people knocking something that might be misused and blaming it on the something. I have had great success with the solderless breadboards and I have had failures as well. It was educational and well worth the experience. Since then, I have learned to use them when appropriate and not use them otherwise. Have you done the same?

As a fallen human being, there isn't much that's really beneath me.

I'm not insulting people who use them--the first project that I ever designed and built for myself, over 40 years ago, was a big white solderless breadboard on top of a chassis with dual tracking regulators inside. (Well, sort-of tracking. IIRC it used a dual gang pot and uA78G and uA79G regulators in 4-pin TO3s. Power came from a 25.2V CT transformer, a bridge rectifier, and two caps.

I found that I almost never used it--partly because it was big and clunky, but also because I didn't like having to take up so much space if the circuit was at all complicated.

I also have one that somebody gave me, sitting on top of a cabinet in the lab, which I've never used.

I learned dead-bug construction in my first job, designing timing and frequency control stuff for satellite radio equipment. It was the house style where I worked, and it was good medicine, so I never looked back.

I only ever use perf board for the very occasional emergency client job--some clients don't like dead bug even when they're in a jam. (I've done this only once, iirc, when a client was out of town on a job and needed a custom temperature controller ASAP.)

My son is more of a perf board guy, but that's mostly because his prototyping work so far has involved several uC demo boards with stuff hung off them.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Check; i think the company name began with a "C"; they had a variety of tapes: black, transparent red, transparent blue; and many DIP patterns (round pad and oval pad).

Maybe you are talking about Beldesol and mimics of that insulation? Looked a lot like amber enamel, and becameso common that many users were not aware that they did NOT have enamel wire.