Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Professional Prototyping Hardware Defined (Breadboard, Jumpers, low R stuff)
Siwastaja:
Agree, use solder.
The more you solder, the quicker you get with it.
It doesn't need to be pretty. It may or may not use a copper clad ground plane. Whatever floats your boat.
Plugging an IC, a few passives and ten dupont wires into a breadboard takes 1 minute.
Soldering the same stuff ("Manhattan" style for example) takes about 2-3 minutes once you get into it.
The small amount of "saved" time is irrelevant, because the latter is way more reliable, and because then you will be measuring The Thing for 15 minutes before you do a small iterative chance (soldering for 10 seconds, swapping a part or something).
Spinning a PCB, OTOH, takes from a day to a week. Maybe two hours if you have in-house quick prototype fab, but then you likely won't have through hole plating or multilayer so quite limiting. In any case, this is a non-option for early prototyping where quick (minutes) cycles are important. At the later stage, you spin a PCB which completes all the 1000 expected parts and connections, then make the 10 necessary modifications to it. This works when you have most of the things kinda nailed down, but not when you still need proof-of-concepts.
I haven't used a breadboard for a decade. I don't understand the argument how they would be handy even for the "simple" stuff. Soldering time is O(n), just like breadboarding!
E-Design:
As a professional in the electronics design industry, I will say this. Breadboards and jumper wires will never be considered "professional" - no matter how reliable and nice looking.one makes them. Today, PCB's are far too easy and low cost to be messing around with any of that other stuff. One goal of a prototype is to take a first cut at the actual design - so that means just go for a first cut PCB. It could be hacked up of course to fix bugs and even have some of those copper clad boards, but its not going to be sitting on a solderless breadboard.
Thats not saying solderless breadboards aren't useful or important. Indeed, they allow some very fast investigation for some things that could make sense. But in my mind, that would be done before getting a first cut proto PCB.
Just another opinion.
Mecanix:
--- Quote from: tggzzz on July 21, 2020, 11:17:25 am ---Not necessarily, for example
--- End quote ---
Work of art, and skillful. Thanks for sharing those, inspiring. Pretty much what I've been bound too lately, although not as elegant, similar processes were imposed to get result in some of the real-life sim I had to put up with (i.e. single layer pcb cnc mill'ed with a 30deg endmill and then manually drilled). Tried/failed chemical etching fantasies though (tried once mind you, and wont ever again lol), and now hope to move on to bread-boarding shall we have a semi-professional approach to that. When I say semi I mean by that ultra low impedance (preferably), stable contacts and some decent leads & pins. For some fck ing strange reason this is nowhere to be found although fairly easy to achieve diy with the right material/construction, I'm guessing.
Not having access to half-functioning kits commercially, in 2020, is just mind boggling to me. Bet eSellers feeding off the ignorant a buck at at a time selling warped plastics and oxidized non-treated surfaces/ferrous materials is all okay still today and the way to go! Go figure...
joeqsmith:
We were using 3M breadboards in the 70's/80's. Consider that most of the circuits were digital and we were using a lot of 4000 CMOS back then. Circuit boards cost a lot more back then and we would spend a lot more upfront time tying to workout any problems. I wish I had some pictures of some of the crazy things we had built using them. Some were works of art.
sokoloff:
Not my year, but 6.111 was one of my favorite undergrad courses. We had a “nerd kit” (briefcase with multiple breadboards and a back plane connector similar to the TI NuBus). This year looks like more generic kits. Final project was with at least one other student (by requirement) which meant usually multiple of these kits linked together.
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