I’m new to electronics and am planning on building a few small projects before I try my hand at the mighty MB64.
I went to a local electronic supply store yesterday and was interested in the breadboards they had, especially “perfboards” – the kind with just the holes and little copper rings etched around each one of them. I was reading about them on the Internet, and someone wrote that they’re great for prototyping, although you end up with a mess of wires on the under side to make all the connections.
Is it possible to make tracks between the holes using plain ol’ solder? I mean, instead of using wires, can I just “connect the dots” with solder?
I think what I’ve seen, has been done by putting a bare wire against the prefboard and then applying solder to build the “Tracks”. Looked a bit messy, but I think it worked ok. At least it looked better, than a big mess of point-to-point wires.
i use protoboards like the one you mentioned quite often. what i do is just bridge adjacent pads and use solid, insulated wire for larger gaps. i use bare wire for medium sized gaps (as long as no other components will get in the way, or for “sneaky” connections (i.e. under ICs, etc.). a good trick is to solder a component on to the board and then bend the lead over to the pad that you want it to connect to and use that as a bare wire connection.
the absolute best way to use a protoboard though, is to map out your circuit ahead of time and use a conductive silver trace pen. basically, this is a pen whose ink is conductive and will carry electricity wherever you draw a line. try to do it ahead of time though, so you can bake it for 10 min to cure the traces. that said, even though i have one of those pens (12 bucks at radio shack, i think), i still resort to bridging and wire interconnects in most cases.
depending on your skills, this method can take a while. i suggest practicing a bit with a smaller circuit if you’re new to this. i think etching your own pcbs is probably the best way to do things for larger circuits, but i don’t have a drill press. i just finished building a complete edrum module using the above method and it took a LONG time.
By now i´ve midified my old organ and made my midibox sid using breadboards only. I use a combination of bridges on the kobber side and short wires (wiith one stiff connector in the the middle) Don´t use too long wires and think about the order you mount them.
I think it´s a good start to make the first boards on breadboards cause you get a good and deep insight of the circet. A good place to start practice is to build the symectric stuff like the din module.
I’ve done all my boards like others have descibed above (solder bridging/wire interconnects). I’m new to electronics too, but here is an example of how I’ve done it: