Home lab parts

No. GND on perf board can be excellent. And there is nothing flaky.

Phase noise adder to oscillator signal: <

>

< non-differential half of Win's ribbon preamp: < >

AOE3 transistor noise measurement setup: <

>

FFT analyzer with Beaglebone Black and some pre-etched macros: (The macros are Altium snippets to be recycled for the final board, LTC 2500-32 ADC + Coolrunner interface)

< >

Cheers, Gerhard

Grin.. well all my 'scrap' boards are at my PPoE. :^)

Hey thanks everyone for the nice responses. Forgive me if I didn't respond to you directly.

George H.

My tuppence-worth:

A couple each 4066/4053/4051 analog switches and couple each CMOS logic

4001 4011 4013 4017 4093 - old slow 4000 series because it is flexible enough for when analog meets digital proof of concept tinkering and can be used to 18V. When you need speed then probably best to order the right faster more modern parts as required.

A few scraps of ferrite, beads, salavaged ring cores etc.

A pocket AM/SW/FM BC pocket radio - not really for entertainment but handy for chasing RFI.

A few of the oft-mocked 555 timers can be handy too.

piglet

Thanks. The 7404 bur looks good for small cuts. So far I've done it with the little cutting disks. Works great but occasionally a disk breaks and the shards fly fast. You almost need full-face protection instead of just googles but it could still hit the neck.

The upside of using a disk is that you'll get straight lines without using a guide. Though that only matters aesthetically.

It's even worse with accessories for med-tech apparatus where you have to be "on the list" or they won't sell. They are often paranoid about a competitor buying the stuff. Importing (legally) works though.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

My perf board has GND and power planes like Gerhard hinted. It's expensive and not always easy to obtain. Still, I largely went away from that and towards SMT. I was an SMT early adopter, starting in 1986.

I don't like dead bugging because the pin orders are always mirrored. So I cut small snippets of wood, copperclad or whatever, and glue the snippets and then the parts to larger copperclad. Then it's "living bug style", still on top and the pin order is as in the datasheet.

Early on I used the (washed) wooden sticks of ice cream on a stick and cut them up. The kind with nut and almond chunks in there:

However, that has not so good effects on the waist line so I gave up on it. Had to.

"Stay out of Orange County"? :-)

I also got a running out of friends and money story from Orange County even though it did not affect me directly.

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Thanks piglet, I do have some parts from my previous life, (last century, grad school, academia... etc. 74xx and

4000 logic and some magnetic's stuff. )

I did buy a few kits from amazon, MF 1% resistors, a diode kit and Al electro cap kit... $33.00 total. Everything will be here Monday. I need some nice lighting... I wonder if I can just rewire some old shop lamps for these new T8 led bulbs?

George H.

If you use something like Vector 8007, which has a ground plane on the component side, sure. In my experience very few people do. Plane perf board with wired grounds is horrible--not as bad as white proto boards, but not that far off.

Seriously? You can easily get five wires onto a DIP pin in dead-bug mode, and it's trivially easy to inspect. Not so perf board.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Huh, OK I don't know if this is true for the little grinding disks, but the shop instructor always warned against any non-ferrous metal on the grinder.. cause the metal just loads up the grinding wheel, rather than wearing it away.. (too soft.)

Which I've seen when using (hand held) grinding wheels on brass and such. (I'm not without sin in the use of grinding wheels. :^)

George H.

I've found it hard to control cut depth, or make tight features, with a disk. And the burrs last for months without loading up. The burr will also drill through the board, for a via or screw hole.

I draw lines on the board with a straightedge and a Sharpie and then cut away the copper freehand with the burr. People perceive "straight" as the long-term trend and not so much local imperfections.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 
picosecond timing   precision measurement  

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

With the wide range of ESR available in alpo caps, you can find something to suit just about any regulator. I use tants in protos because I have hundreds in the drawer, but I very rarely design them into anything these days.

Alpos rock. (100% aluminum and aluminum byproducts.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Which is ... theoretically true but ... it works. I have done many proto boards that way.

Disclaimer: Don't do it! (I don't know what an OSHA inspector would have said about it).

[...]

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

A local company has a lot of component kits for beginners:

m/ They have a retail store in NE Ocala as well. The address in on their we bsite. One kit for everyone would cost more and have a lot of stuff that mo st people would never use. Maybe Analog, Digital and Power supply component kits would work.

I still have some pats I bought over 50 years ago as parts of kits, just to get a few that I needed. Over 1000 Akro-mills plastic drawers of oddball c omponents ad hardware cover a couple carts and one eight foot workbench tha t could be put to better use.

I used to win bets, when someone would come to my home shop and wave an obs olete part in my face "I usually had something they could use. One guy bet me $20, that there was n way that I had any of those old, stud mounted 8mF, 450 VDC military capacitors. I took his $20 and sold him one cap for $6. I had about 20. ;-)

I've wasted too many hours debugging those plug-in things, and you can't just drag them from a storage box and expect things to work.

The SMD components solder on top of the grid board, between the pads. I rarely turn one over.

CH

for Mouser type of stuff, consider:

An assortment of good quality patch cords, alligator clips (lots of differe nt sizes - mini, micro, etc.) probe extenders, (I like Pomona for this type of stuff) chemicals (dioxit,etc.) Good quality magnifier+light, headband m agnifier with light, panavise/third hand-or similar,

In general: Give serious thought to how you want to store/catalog/access al l the pieces n parts. The more stuff I accumulate, the more I forget where things are and spend an inordinate amount of time hunting for things. Har bor Freight has a lot of different storage boxes/containers/organizers for cheap when on sale or with coupons. In general, I am not a big fan of thro w it in a box of similar stuff...I personally like a combination of the pla stic boxes and these types of storage chests:

/G2213477/ They drawers can be sectioned off to accomodate many different types of com ponents in one drawer, making it more space efficient. Hope this helps Good luck J

I do this: About $3AU each.

Clifford Heath

Yeah, I don't know what happened to tant's.

So we had an old instrument... no longer made, but still supported. ~2-30 yrs old. I got one back that stopped working... PS rail shorted. I traced it down to a tant.

16V tant on a 15V rail. There were ~100 tant's in each instrument. ~200 instruments... That is the one old time tant failure I know about. Would anyone pass a 16V tant on 15V rail these days?

George H.

A _hundred_ tants in each instrument? What was it, ENIAC?

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Oh no.. white proto's are for one time testing... you can't put it on the shelf and expect it to work again.

GH

Hmm well there were a bunch stitched into power supplies on each board. ~four supplies per board, a few tants per supply rail, maybe less than 100. more than ten. :) An RF amp board, wide power traces and lotsa caps.

George H. I still remember being surprised by the 16V rating on the cap. (not my design.) At the same time I'd use 16V Al's in

15V supplies. Is that still done, or do you derate Al's too?