I bought a 2" square ProtoBoard (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8811) from SFE to make a project I had wired up to my Arduino more durable. Can someone point me in the direction of a good tutorial on how to solder/wireup these boards?
I’ve searched Sparkfun and Instructables, but I still have some really beginner questions:
What is this thing called? It looks like perfboard and stripboard are common terms for something that looks a bit like the protoboard that I bought. Are these different things?
A number of sites I’ve seen talk about cutting the lines between holes. What kind of tools would I use to do that? An X-ACTO knife?
On one side of the board it looks like there are connection between all the holes, and on the other side none of the holes are connected. Do I put the wires through the no-connection side, solder them on the connection side, and then cut the lines to isolate portions I want to use?
Sorry for the simplistic questions, but a fair amount of searching Google and this forum turned up a lot of questions that were more advanced that I was looking for.
With that type of board I solder all the components in place first, and then wire point to point on the underside with insulated wire. Wire wrap wire (you can buy it from suppliers like Digi-Key) is quite good, but breaks easily, so I often use slightly thicker Teflon-coated wire. I picked up a roll of it on Ebay quite cheaply, it’ll last me for years. I’d advice planning your layout first on graph paper; as you get more experience you will get a feel for it and can dispense with the graph paper.
Perfboard just has holes and circuits are assembled as above, with components simply pushed through the holes. Stripboard has to be cut to break the strips, with wire jumpers soldered on the top.
bare. This one has no copper at all; parts are inserted and the leads bent. Solder the leads to each other or use wire jumpers
pad-per-hole. This one has an isolated solder pad around each hole. Use like the bare ones, except you can solder the leads and wires to the pads for strength. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8811 is like this
stripboard. This one has all of the holes in a row (or column, depending on which way you turn the board) connected together. You solder the parts as above, and cut the strips into sections with an exacto knife, drill bit, or a special tool to make separate connections in a row.
Whiteblock or DIP style. This one has connections on groups of holes (usually 3 to 5) spaced like they are on a whiteblock solderless breadboard. They also usually have a few rows with all holes tied together to form power and ground busses. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8813 is an unusual version of this
Pad-per-hole with plane. This one has the pad-per-hole layout and a ground mesh between all of the pads. To ground a lead, you just fold it over and solder it to the mesh. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8815 is like this
solid copper. This one is the opposite of the bare one; All holes are tied together with a copper plane. The copper gets used for ground, Leads that get grounded just get soldered to the copper. You use a drill or special tool to remove the copper around holes for leads that aren’t grounded, and you wire those like on the bare board.