I bought this board over 30 years ago, I have developed many a circuit on it.
I hesitate to call it a breadboard, because that term seems to have been hijacked by a particular type of solderless plastic board that I do find useful for simple digital stuff, but it has its limitations.
Does anyone make anything similar?
Provision for 2x 16 pin DILs and lots of large pads to splat solder to. No other through holes, other than for mounting.
Does anyone remember Radionics? When I were a lad and my parents did not want me burning myself or embedding solder in the carpet, they bought me many of these kits and accessories. Basically sheets of Perspex with peg board style holes. all components came with studs, 6BA in brass and plastic bases with the correct number of pins. Note this was before ICS. The connections were made using brass strip punctured with holes at the same pitch as the board, and these could be cut to any length you liked and were cheap as chips so no issues there. Lots of nuts needed etc, and obviously things like coils needed to have spade or similar ends and there had to be battery clips etc. most projects could be powered by pp9 or Bijou 3v batteries. You got circuits and suggested layouts. However of course once you learned the basics of how transistors worked one was encouraged to design ones own circuits. this simple system taught me a a heck of a lot about stuff not just the colour codes of resistors and the values of capacitors etc, but the way transistors worked. Most of the transistors at that time were Germanium and easily destroyed of course, but also they were cheap. As my father worked in the industry I could easily get them replaced on the original bases. As I recall, inductors were blue, semiconductors yellow, resistors red, Capacitors white. Things like relays and transformers were considered to be inductors.
Bit on the large side for prototyping today, but for teaching I think it was great. There was even a simple binary counting project using one astable and several bistable circuits with low current bulbs in the collector circuits. They were made in Three Bridges Crawley. Brian
There was another breadboarding system based on a matrix of springs mounted vertically. By bending a spring over, components could be trapped in the turns of the spring. Not very compact but it worked well.
I made a system for I/C's on 12 " Square fiberglass one sided copper clad onto which I etch a simple pattern for i/c socket where each pin came out to a turret tag for soldering to - again worked quite well. I mounted it all in a nice mahogany box - may even have it still somewhere.
Of course the original 'breadboard' was literally a bread board with brass screws put in and soldered to. No doubt perfectly functional.
Andrew
Never seen anything like that.
I use Veroboard Copper Tripad Board, which is veroboard with the tracks broken every 3 holes, which is ideal for DIL layouts.
Here's a postcript program to print a board on a postscript laser printer (or via ghostscript onto anything) so you can mark out your component layout.
%!PS-Adobe-2.0 %%Creator: Andrew Gabriel %%CreationDate: 30th March 1994 %%DocumentData: Clean7bit %%DocumentFonts: %%LanguageLevel: 1 %%Orientation: Portrait %%Pages: 1 %%EndComments
72 10 div dup scale % set units to 1/10ths inch%%BeginProlog
% Constants
/radius 0.1 def % radius of hole /track 0.3 def
%...............................................................................
/drawhole { /y exch def /x exch def x radius add y moveto newpath x y radius 0 360 arc closepath
y 3 mod 0 eq { x track sub y 0.5 sub moveto x track sub y 0.5 add lineto x track add y 0.5 sub moveto x track add y 0.5 add lineto } { y 3 mod 1 eq { x track sub y 0.5 sub moveto x track sub y track add lineto track 2 mul 0 rlineto 0 track 0.5 add neg rlineto } { x track sub y 0.5 add moveto x track sub y track sub lineto track 2 mul 0 rlineto 0 track 0.5 add rlineto } ifelse } ifelse
0.01 setlinewidth stroke } def%...............................................................................
%%EndProlog %%Page: 1 1
10 10 translate1 1 63 { /y exch def 1 1 39 { y drawhole } for } for
showpage % print sheet %%EOF
Those springs were mainstay of the Tandy Radio Shack Science Fair
150-in-1 electronic kit.Watching that vid gives me goosebumps...
Made some great things to upset local radio reception ...
I remember one Christmas morning playing with this kit on the dining table, completely oblivious to the fact that behind me in the kitchen the toaster had just caught fire....
Basically reborn as 'Snap Circuits'.
Those spring kits were easily greatly upgraded by simply pulling all the components off. Then you can make far more things. String the parts between springs instead of wires - I always wondered why they fitted the components.
NT
The first electronic project I ever tried building was a radio from a ladybird book on how to build your own radio... that used screws into a wood board, but with brass screw cups that were used to trap the lead ends under.
Alas it never did work in its full configuration (the build was staged such that you started with a crystal detector, and then worked up until you have a regenerative tuner). It was a very old design and called for some (relatively old even in the late 70's) components like glass encapsulated OC71 transistors. It also used a postage stamp style trimmer I recall was impossible to find.
Regens are simple in principle but very fussy & unstable in practice, and not something I'd suggest for a beginner.
Radios, flashing lights etc don't interest kids now.
NT
Batteries and bulbs , used drawing pins in wood with paper clips as switches.
common proto PCB on the bay now is matrix board with pads, there are quite a few variants
I found an old(ish) forum post from someone selling dead bug boards;
No provision for through hole DILs, though.
Easy enough to get your own PCBS made up as I found.
$20 and you get 10 or so shipped from China.
So if anyone wants a two channel high impedance buffer from a PC sound card...
All the various breadboard ideas sound wonderful. And perhaps are for students starting out - or one who merely designs theoretical circuits (like Turnip). Or for assembling projects designed for that breadboard.
More experienced constructors will find it easier just to use Veroboard. At least you won't then be chasing dodgy connections. And when you've got the prototype working you can keep it for reference. The costs of the components are so small compared to the labour.
I had that book, and noticed it's still in the bookshelf at my parents' home a few weeks ago when searching for things that might be of interest to my nephew.
I also recall the stamp style trimmer couldn't be obtained anymore, but I nicked one out of an old TV.
Actually, these IIRC:
However, this was many decades before the Internet.
When I worked as a lab tech in the EOD (Electro Optical Devices) lab at Mullards in Southampton in the late 1960's many prototypes started life on Veroboard, but as things developed and bits got added they grew into quite complex 3D sculptures using tinned copper wire for 'risers'. Then the fun came re-building it back on 2D Veroboard, checking the circuit diagram had kept up with the evolution of the actual circuit, then creating a mask for a PCB using a sort of Etch-O-Sketch that scraped red wax off transparent sheets.
(Incidentally, the OC71 line was in the next bay !)
Andrew
I think I used a modern style trimmer, and just added wire leads in the end...
Alas at that age (probably 9 ish) I had neither the test equipment or the knowledge to troubleshoot it and trace through the circuit.
With hindsight it was a poor first project since it was an ancient design even then, but it was a gateway to electronics mags, and veroboard, and then computers so I am not complaining!
Yup that was the beastie... I recall the instructions about bending out the terminal lugs such that they would reach between screw cups.
Or at least cost effective end user access to it...
I tend to use square-pad board:
- it has holes so you can mount DILs and through hole components
- you aren't forced into a strip layout so can route however you like
- you can add SMDs easily
- by stanley-knifing the 2.54mm square pads in half you can fit SOICs or other 1.27mm parts.
It's basically dead-bug but with added holes. 'Splatting' bigger components is easy - the solder will join up the pads. Though I rarely use through-hole components these days as SMD are a lot more compact. It's quite easy to ignore the holes except for the bits you need to use them for (eg connectors).
If you're being cheapstake there are similar but on SRBP and with round holes not square ones, which are slightly more annoying to use:
I never really understood why people would torture their layout to make it fit stripboard...
Theo
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