Greetings
As a newcomer to the wonderful world of electronics, I have recently setup a minor electronics lab in my home and started to build a few things. My tools and equipment exists of standard components (resistors, capacitors, ICs, etc), soldering iron, a bunch of veroboards and a multimeter. I do not, however, own an oscillator or any of those more expensive tools like PCB-etching equipment and such. Atleast not yet.
As stated above, I'm using veroboards (stripboard and breadboard is a synonyme for the same thing, i think) for building my circuits. I also own a licence of Electronic Workbench (Multisim and Ultiboard are the ones I use most frequently). However, since I do not own any etching equipment Ultiboard is of less use for me since it can only do PCB-layout/routing. I have contacted the developers to hear if there was any possibility to make Ultiboard output to veroboards, but regretfully enough UB is designed for PCB only, was the answer.
- Is there any layout/routing-application that is able to output layouts for veroboards? I have only found two cheap shareware-programs on Google. Even if they work, they were terribly tedious to use (limited amount of components etc). Is there no commercial or fully developed program anywhere? A great plus would be if the program could read the format that Multisim saves to, thus allowing me to save time by not designing the whole circuit all over.
- When constructing on veroboards, I often have the need in cutting the boards to smaller shapes and I've found that it's pretty cumbersome since I haven't found any good tips of how to do it the right way. For new boards, I could take a small saw and shape it up without much problems. But for new circuits that I haven't done before, cutting the boards could lead to a too small board in the end, requiring me to start it all over again.
Therefore I build new circuits on unmodified boards, so I get the whole space to begin with and cut it down later. But here's the problem. When I cut (not using a saw), the board usually tends to break up and it seems it doesn't want to be cut in straight line. I've tried a long and sharp knife, placing it between the lines of copper, and pushed hard. But the board still tends to break up in pieces near the end.
Has anyone got a tip / link for me where I can read about how to cut boards without any breaks?
Thanks in advance.