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Jumper selection

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jpwack:
Good morning everyone:

Recently I've seen some designs jumping from ye olde 0.1'' jumper to solder jumpers (which look like a SMD resistor pad, with a tiny wire in between to be cut or resoldered).

The benefits I can see are:
 - Cost 0
 - Only one side of the PCB is used

The drawback is:
 - No easy manipulation (or impossible w/o knife and soldering gun)

Anyway, which is better for general use? Temporally I'm sticking with the classics, but for the "almost always default" scenario I'm having doubts.

Cheers! 

Simon:
well it really depends n your use of the jumper, if you want it as a user selectable thing it has to be a real jumper, if it's a case of your doing a mass produced thing and want to alter the functioning just before shipping go for the solder jumper, for example you have to have real jumpers on a motherboard or they would be a waste of time

Jon Chandler:
On my TAP-28 board, which is aimed more towards dedicated applications as opposed to a traditional development board, I used solder jumpers to connect LEDs, switches and pullup resistors into the circuit. There were two considerations:

* The jumpers were not likely to require changes once configured
* The cost of traditional pin jumpers is not insignificant
A side benefit is that solder jumpers don't take up much space on the board.

If the application may require changes during its life, especially if used by people who may not have a soldering iron handy, then the traditional jumpers are the best answer.  If the jumpers will be fixed after programming, solder jumpers are a good alternative.

TAP-28 PIC Applications Board

TheDirty:
It seems pretty straightforward.  Solder bridges are useful for configuration items that hardly ever change.  Sparkfun seems to do a lot of these since they have generic modules that solder bridges can be used to manage the functionality.

Neilm:
I have seen these used on boards that were laid out with star pointed ground system. It allowed the designer to use the PCB layout software to route the differing 0Vs and keep dedicate where the grounds joined. Now most boards with any significant logic are using ground planes with a common 0V throughout the board this practice is dying out.

Neil

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