prototype pcb boards

I think Radio Shack still sells them.

I've seen them at both Fry's Electronics (I don't know if that's a local thing in my area or not) and at Radio Shack.

Fry's is a West Coast thing. I wish there was one here.

I had forgotten about Radio Shack. They do indeed have pcb's configured the same as solderless bread boards.

Dan

I used to work at a place that had proto boards made up that consisted of holes on a 0.1" grid. Each hole had a 0.075" square pad. The pads were not grouped at all, just pads on a 0.1" grid.

Good for thru hole ics etc, some SOT stuff, smd passives could be placed between pads. To link pads they could be jumpered together or just run a solder blob across the gaps. Quick & easy.

Before I could simulate my chip designs, I bread-boarded them like this...

(1/2 of a full-size version. This dates back to the late '70's. I no longer have any of it left, but I still have the films.) ...Jim Thompson

Better with a ground plane on the other side, with nice big keepouts so DIPs and passives don't short out, e.g. Vector 8007, which is my personal fave when I have to use perf board.

Generally perf board protos are much flakier than dead bug ones, I find, as well as much slower to construct.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Good idea, added ground grid to my prototype area.

http://173.224.223.62/power/screen.jpg

Every once in a while I need to whomp up a circuit on a solderless breadboard, either to test out whether something will really work in the real world, or (more often) to do a bit of signal conditioning or make a signal big enough to drive a cheezy speaker or some such.

Less often, but still often enough, I then need to make that circuit permanent -- when that happens, I use those critters from Rat Shack.

I like to build live-bug on plain copperclad.

On a sunny day (Wed, 19 Feb 2014 09:32:11 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Wow, 3D!

You could build a house, or an airplane, from soldered bits of FR4.

Imagine kits of pre-cut, labeled pieces.

Where do you get your copper? I used to ask the purchasing guy to get me 12"x12" 2 sided blanks from the board house, wasn't a problem for him to get 3 or 4 at a clip.

Cheers

ebay, usually.

Scotchbrite or Soft-Scrub will shine them up nicely, makes them easy to solder. Phil pointed out that crazy-glue sticks things down pretty well, especially if you scruff it up a bit first.

I want to get some gold plated. Those protos get tarnished and grody looking after a few weeks.

In the event that the Rat Shack doesn't, or discontinues them, there's always Vector boards. Mouser has a pretty good selection. You want to find the general area in their catalog on their on-line ordering system, then look at catalog pages for the rest.

Hello Sir, The most cost-competitive and best quality PCBs are now sourced from India, followed by Vietnam. So, if you are trying to get boards for any serious work, you have to contact some manufacturer from there.

Nonsense. The best are still made in the US (expensive, though) but the absolute *worst* I've seen are from India. Absolute junk from companies that have no idea what they're doing (don't even know Ohm's law). If you want to save money, go to China but steer *very* clear of India.