Prototyping?

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.

It's a lot neater than my stuff.

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?"

Nice. Thanks!

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:

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

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.

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.

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 ;-)

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?

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...

Sure. Sometimes you can get a great board for under $100. But then a few years into production with that programmable on your own PCB you hear a bell toll and that's the last order call. Then the purchasing manager comes scurrying down the hallway all red in the face.