Solderless breadboard capacitance

Jeroen Belleman · 2026-05-28T11:48:35+00:00

I've seen the capacitance between adjacent contacts of solderlessbreadboards, so loved by people tinkering with micro-controllers,stated to be in excess of 15pF sometimes. I measured it: It turnsout to be not nearly so bad: Only 2.5pF.It's no good for serious RF work, to be sure, but it will be finein most cases for digital stuff up to 20MHz or so.Jeroen Belleman

May 28, 2026 Last reply: 3 months ago 27 Replies

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Jan Panteltje 3 months ago

I use many small adaptors with .1 inch pin spacing, often Chinese modules from ebay you should have noticed in the links I gave I do have a dremel, maybe for some simple minded that is fun to play with but it just makes a lot of shrapnel on the workbench and looks like s*it.

At work I designed among other stuff cards for in the IBM PC, ISA in those days, and the design of the peeseebees was given to a local company here after I did the veroboard tests of the circuits, Never a problem. But the stuff was usually very specific and actually not a mass production thing, where thousands were needed.

Diamonds shine even better! And are forever!

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Jan Panteltje 3 months ago

Things like that are a lot cheaper done on veroboard, no gold needed

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is great for SMDs too:

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in some places you can just use wires, ..

Put it in a box with battery, still working 11 years later:

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has USB control too.

See real gold connectors! I know you like that! Sent some to Fort Knox, they could use some gold there with that deficit!

You cannot be fired!

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Jeroen Belleman 3 months ago

That table basically tells us to use at least 10kHz to measure pF capacitance.

Jeroen Belleman

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Jeroen Belleman 3 months ago

It's always been customary for multi-meters to have of ranges and to state the maximum value of each. It was like that already when they were still called 'galvanometers'.

Jeroen Belleman

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