Prototyping?

I have no access to good shop tools anymore. In the good old days I had a power shear.

The original was about a foot square.

I've just about run out of scraps, afer all these years. I think I'll do up a bunch of maybe a 4" x 6" equivalent at one of those cheapy board sites.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
         America: Land of the Free, Because of the Brave

Clean and shine it with Brasso, rinse well, rinse with isopropyl, rinse with acetone (if you don't have any aceton-vulnerable parts), dry thoroughty, and spray with Krylon.

Cheers! Rich

That'll leave an awful stench next time you make a change.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

It's a lot neater than my stuff.

(just trying this imageshack thing, The ABSE seems sometimes erratic)

I tend to end up with 'hybrids' (the centre blue object). Scissors+tinplate+solder allows adding an instant HF groundplane, while keeping the usual protoboard friendliness.

The krylon is acrylic - it should come right off with a little acetone or ethyl acetate. :-)

Cheers! Rich

I really like these:

John

Yeah but who does that? People realize that R13 should really have been to GND instead of Vref, flick on the Weller switch, phsssst ... "Hey, Leroy, did your stogie roll onto the carpet again?"

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Nice. Thanks!

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

I was looking around recently at different prototyping options. Here's what I came up with:

Low frequency prototyping systems/adapters:

High frequency prototyping systems:

The USA distributor of Wainwright Instruments Inc., whose prototyping system was mentioned in the Jan. 12 issue is : RDI Wainwright, 69 Madison Ave., Telford, PA 18969-1829; (215) 723-4333; fax: (215) 723-4620; e-mail:

[Has some problems with the Web site right now.

Similar "Snap-apart" System for SMD land patterns that you glue on a ground plane

Similar system "schmartboard": But they use Solder Mask channels that are higher than the pads rather than lower that each pin of a package fits into. Claims it makes it much easier to hand Solder.

Boards are available from Mouser. Each of the little land pattern modules has a land pattern connection on the edge of the board (schmartbridge) that allows the little boards to be snapped together.

This is a review article of the system published on the "Citizen Scientist" web site:

Web sites that sells the land patterns on PCB boards

Links:

This has a good treatment of the different prototyping systems (high freq and low) ones out there:

Examples of high frequency prototypes

Robert H.

I take it you mean microstrip, not stripline.

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Rick

Well, I wouldn't expect you to take a prototype that's not even done yet, and dress it up for presentation! You don't lacquer it until it's ready to go on display, silly. ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Yep, sorry. Occasionally I had a piece of copper or copper clad over it though, sometimes the bottom of the enclosure. Controlled distance but legally that still doesn't make it stripline I guess.

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Well, you know engineers, don't ya? There will always be last minute changes, just like programmers aren't really done until the amount of ROM is 99.5% filled ;-)

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

More than 99.5% filled. We had to do compression/decompression on the last gadget we did, to fit 6 mbits of fpga config plus the application code into a 4 mbit eprom. Not only did it work, but the fpga load got faster!

John

With so many of the parts being SMT, I'll resort to blank vector board and use copper tape for ground plane. I use wire wrap wire and tack solder to the component leads. Mind you, this is for checking out a small circuit. If you need to check out larger circuits, use a rapid prototype PCB house. I costs about $50 (double sided) to $100 (4 layer) board. This is cheaper than spending a day putting together a hand wired kludge.

For SMT ICs, you can convert them to thru-hole with "surfboards". I think Digi-Key sells them.

Mark

Friend of mine was a manager at an unnamed company, developing a self-guided arillery round. They were going out to do the show and tell, so they took the demo rounds and removed all the debug and programming connectors flush with the board, and sealed them.

Day of test, they fire the round, it approaches the tank, and zigs left when it should have zigged right.

Next test round, does the same thing.

Third one, another clean miss.

Next day, they are doing the post mortem before they all go on to looking for their next jobs, and one engineer speaks up "I don't know what went wrong. The changes I made were not even in that part of the code..."

Boss says "WHAT CHANGES????"

Engineer says, "Well, I had a great idea that optimized out about a hundred lines of code. Let me tell you, I had a heck of a time soldering on the programming lines..."

He said the guy did live... 8-)

Charlie

Has anyone tried one of these?

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Service to my country? Been there, Done that, and I\'ve got my DD214 to
prove it.
Member of DAV #85.

Michael A. Terrell
Central Florida

I haven't tried that, but I do have one of Intel's toy microscopes (IntelPlay QX3) that really comes in handy for reading tiny parts. It does 10x, 60x, and 200x. Here are pictures of some parts, which don't happen to have markings on them except the last one:

If you want to prototype with CPLDs and FPGAs, just get a dev board. You can generally find one with the right combination of common peripherals already on it. Much cheaper and faster than designing your own board...

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Ben Jackson AD7GD

http://www.ben.com/