30 years experience says the best way to use a breadboard is don't use one.
They suffer from contact wear, stray capacitance and inductance, unreliable contacts and rather non optimal signal routing. This slowly adds up to pending headaches like failing circuits and ones that can't be reproduced. Even the nice 3M ones are problematic.
I tend to use single sided copper clad board and build stuff rats nest. Drill some holes through the board and screw it to the inside of a die cast box lid and for a one off it's good. Works fine up to 1GHz or so with some thinking unlike breadboards (1MHz if the planets are aligned appropriately). Also works for high voltage and high current stuff. If you have lots of digital, flip the ICs upside down and use kynar for signal routing.
Here's one I did last year where someone stole the internal oscillator out of an RF signal generator so I built one from the service manual schematics. Prototype: https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs ... This was "productionised" onto a custom PCB: https://imgur.com/WM44RYl
There are plenty of projects for which solderless breadboards are unsuitable, but there are also lots for which they're perfectly fine. Lots of hobbyists and most professionals will outgrow solderless breadboards sooner or later, but they're still a good place to get started.
Spend an hour in an undergrad EE lab helping people with fucked up breadboards and you change your mind rapidly. Same goes for hobbyists but they don’t have someone to help them available.
I’ve seen people chewed up for hours debugging a circuit and find it’s a breadboard problem.
Yeah, I wouldn't use them in that sort of setting.
I do use breadboards for quickly checking out relatively simple, low-frequency circuits. But if the circuit appears to be malfunctioning, I suspect the breadboard first (after double-checking the circuit wiring). I also think of breadboards as being consumables, and as soon as one gives the slightest whiff of trouble, I get rid of it.
I think they're very useful tools, but you need to be aware of how iffy they actually are and use them appropriately.
I think they selling point is that you do not have to solder. Soldering is not for everyone: you need expensive equipment, soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is quite harmful to your health, young kids should not solder.
I used breadboard to play with electronics during winter in my small appartment at that time. No troubles with fumes, no need to buy expensive soldering station, no need to safely get rid of tin with lead. This was a good way to start, now I own a soldering station but now I also know that I need it about 2 or 3 a month.
Respiratory risks of solder aware minimal, particularly ironically the leaded variety. If you’re worried solder with the window open or get an extractor. I haven’t needed either in the last 40 odd years.
The lead itself is harmless unless you ingest lots of it. Wash your hands. That is all you need to do. Take it to the WEEE bin or waste disposal if you discard it.
I learned to solder when I was 8. My kids when they were 10. It’s fine. I built my first amateur radio transceiver when I was 12!
Soldering kit is cheap. Even decent metcal stuff can be had for virtually nothing if you shop around.
Children are up to five times more likely to get lead in their bodies, so under no circumstances should children get leaded tin in their hands.
It is possible to get lead poisoning through the skin even as an adult if lead is handled daily. Fortunately, nowadays lead-free tin is used, but I know that some hobbyists still have a lot of lead in their stores.
Occupational exposure is a lot different than home exposure. People soldering on the job are doing so for hours a day, every day. You soldering as a hobby are not.
The dose makes the poison.
Of course, nothing is completely without risk, and an argument can be made that avoiding any avoidable risk is good, even if that risk is tiny. But the risk that comes from the fumes of soldering, unless you're doing it a whole lot, are much, much smaller than lots of risks you take every day without worry.
Everyone has a different risk tolerance. For instance, I intentionally use leaded solder because it works so much better than the lead-free varieties. But I'm cautious to avoid handling the stuff if I have any open wounds on my hands, and to avoid touching my face until I've washed my hands. That's an acceptable risk for me.
Basic soldering equipment is quite inexpensive. A basic soldering iron can be had for about the same price as a small breadboard. The good stuff gets pricey, but if you aren't doing a lot of soldering, you don't need the good stuff.
> soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is quite harmful to your health
If you have a window and aren't soldering frequently, it's not really all that bad.
> young kids should not solder.
Why not? I was taught to solder when I was 8, and I'm very grateful for that.
I super recommend to anyone, getting the Arduino starter kit, and going through the projects book. Most fun I'd had in ages + a great hands on way to begin to understand how electronics are not magic.
https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-...
I just got my son the "30 days lost in space" inventr.io kit (not associated at all with them). It seems more pricey than your standard Arduino kit for sure, but provides a (pretty lame..) story of the why things are being built.
Point being, as his first (and close to my first) experience with breadboards and programming, he is loving it and having the programming aspect and electronics aspect combined into "this code makes this thing do this" makes it FAR more interesting for him. I doubt it'll be his passion in life (but who knows) but it's certainly helping him pay attention to details and he is certainly learning a good bit about designing some simple circuits. Would recommend.
(Unrelated, but he also got a build your own am/fm radio kit and he successfully soldered all the bits he needed to, having never soldered before and only ended up with one good burn on his hand at the last connection to be made, the negative battery!)
Confidence building things, and a great way of teaching "you can relatively do anything, you just have to practice!". You could see the pride when he flicked the switch and noise was made.
Same , slower, pride on every day he's "lost in space".
Also Raspberry Pi (the Coke to Arduino's Pepsi). More expensive (especially since hoarders have been bulk ordering them and jacking up the price), but IMO more flexible and powerful.
There are several others, but Arduino and Raspberry Pi seem to be the ones with the widest variety of "it just works" add-on components and programming tutorials.
I run an electronic lab at a university — I have the following tips:
- don't cheap out on breadboards unless you plan to manually test every single connection regularily before prototyping
- with some breadboards the (red/blue) power rails are not connected all the way through, but only for half of the board, in doubt always measure. If this is the case with your board, just bridge the rails once and leave them bridged forever.
- if you prototype projects more often get yourself sortiments (e.g. a resistors, film capacitors, ceramic capacitors, electrolytic capacitors). Yes, these sortiments are expensive, but my first private resistor sortiment lasted me for a decade and if you calculate a decade worth of "fuck that part is missing" it is a no-brainer. I literally never regreted getting those.
- if you constantly find yourself using certain connectors build a (heavy) breakout-box for them. Something that doesn't fly off the table easily. Having your breadboard fly of the table because your guitar is connected to it is bullshit.
- there are limits to breadboarding. If you go high voltage, high current and/or high frequency or anything extra sensitive avoid it
- learn how to translate between schematics and breadboards. Nowadays there are many breadboard-illustrations that show you exactly how to connect things. That is neat, but ot is hard to reason about circuits that way, and this will be needed once you deciate from what you find. Most interesting circuits will come as schematics anyways, so learning it is worth it
- if you breadboard complex schematics, print out the schematic and tick off (with a pen) every connection between every pin of every component you make. It is very easy to miss something even for professionals. In the end a circuit is basically just nodes (a single pin of a component) and edges (the connections between them). If you get the topology right, the circuit should work. Exceptions: the schematic is wrong (not uncommon, there is a lot of crap on the internet), the parts are wrong (there is many nuances to each part, beyond their basic value) or the circuit is of a kind that is not suited for breadboarding (see above).
- Sometimes people online claim that X works, but it only works because the part they had lying around had a very specific characteristic that they conceniently failed to mention. It is okay to just give up and move on at some point
- Try to simulate schematics before you breadboard them. Change component values to get a basic intuition for the circuit. I like this one: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html (it has some limitations, e.g. inverter based relaxation oscillators won't oscillate, but for the most stuff this is fine)
- don't forget to add bypass caps. Just get a sack of ceramic 100nF capacitors and sprinkle them between plus and ground on the power rails next to wherever tou put active components (chips, etc)
> don't forget to add bypass caps. Just get a sack of ceramic 100nF capacitors and sprinkle them between plus and ground on the power rails next to wherever tou put active components (chips, etc)
100 years ago when I did my EE undergrad, one big project for a class was to build a very basic 8088 system that would read a boot instruction and then write/read a memory address, with verification via logic analyzer. I painstakingly assembled that thing on my breadboard and noted that it only worked one out of every 10-15 attempts. Adding some decoupling capacitors solved the problem. I wish I had a camera back then. I meticulously cut, bent, arranged, and otherwise made the thing look beautiful as part of the effort.
Do you have some suggestions on what sort of sortiments you like? It seems like many of the common component assortment kits readily available, while having several hundred pieces, only have a handful of any particular value component, which tends to run out rather quickly after only a project or two.
Just get one of those where you have ~10 to 20 of each and get replacements for the ones you suspect to burn through fast (e.g. 1k, 4k7, 10k, 100k and similar common ones). But them in a drawer and refill when you need it.
I had one from a German reseller that doesn't exist anymore. For the university I made my own sortiment buy buying resistors and sorting them into boxes myself. It took 4 days to sort it, which is probably what you pay for when you get a sortiment.
My general approach is to start with a small-to-moderate assortment kit, and after each project restock the bins that are running low/empty with individual-value orders of 100 components or so-- Those are the values you're using a lot of, and so it makes sense to stock them more heavily.
I'd also recommend getting a kit of fixed-length jumper wires; it's much easier to analyze what you've built and turn it back into a circuit diagram when the wire connections are short enough to follow at a glance instead of chasing wires through a ratsnest.
Breadboard specific cut and formed wires such as these: https://www.amazon.com/AUSTOR-Lengths-Assorted-Preformed-Bre... [1] will make both wiring, and verifying, bread-boarded circuits much easier. Plus the actual circuit will be much neater with these wires interconnecting everything.
[1] just the first example I found from a quick search
Thanks for sharing. These are really good advices.
I stopped dabbing into electronics last year due to lack of time, and I'm absolutely sure this is one of the reasons I was scratching my head:
> - learn how to translate between schematics and breadboards. Nowadays there are many breadboard-illustrations that show you exactly how to connect things. That is neat, but ot is hard to reason about circuits that way, and this will be needed once you deciate from what you find. Most interesting circuits will come as schematics anyways, so learning it is worth it
I found it particularly hard to translate if the schematics uses multiple grounds and single line power sources. I found it difficult to figure out whether the components are linked serially or parallel.
I'd love to get an explanation behind the last one. It can be very hard for a non player to understand how connecting power rails like this does anything positive, and why it works better closer to the active element in question.
So it imparts hysteresis and prevents parasitic events in current switching contexts? Would you still need these if somehow the circuit was a low frequency continuous wave function? If feels like these are a side effect of digital use, high speed switching states.
I chose a software analogy and digital example because this is a software forum. Don't read too much into it.
In a different analogy, you could say that capacitance gives inertia to voltage and inductance gives inertia to current. The power loop acts as an inductor and antenna. It's susceptible to disturbances from the chip, the power supply, and interference. Analog chips are particularly susceptible to such disturbances.
The power rails have a non zero impedance (as in not DC), and large currents flow through the rails.
These currents will create voltages that will seem to be noise to anything connected to them.
The caps provide a low Z path to ground so the currents so your rails are stable.
Circuits really need schematics though, so its kinda hard to explain w/out. The fundamental idea is easy enough, but dealing with this properly is very hard.
Whenever your chip draws current from the power-rails in short bursts you esentially momentarily pull down the voltage of the power rail, and it can do that because the power supply has a non-zero internal resistance and thus forms a voltage divider with everything that is connected to it. This dip in voltage can affect neighbouring chips.
The solution is to install a small bucket/reservoir (a capacitor) which is filled with enough charge to serve that burst and smooth it's effect on the power rails (and thus decoupling it from the neighbouring components). The size of that capacitor depends on the load, but for most ICs it is enough to put one 100nF capacitor per power rail, but check the datasheet for more info.
I only want to add that you need resistors with slightly ticker leads. Most of the cheap resistors have either too soft leads or too thin and they do not provide a good contact with the breadboard.
The same applies to wires that you use for the connections. Do not buy the very thin ones. An example of what I use: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3175
Jumpers are good but if you have to do a lot of wiring (e.g. 8 address lines + 8 data lines) then using custom cut wires is the best.
Related: Steve Morrison's BBCircuits (Breadboard Circuits) channel on YouTube (which looks like a great channel for anyone interested in electronics!):
(Yes, I remember Forrest Mims (as an author) from "the old Radio Shack days" (where his books were primarily found, back in the day...) He was a great author of electronics related texts. It's nice to see his works preserved online!)
The video referred by the original post is 5 minutes long so I could probably scan the equivalent text in 1 minute. More, I could use a text version as reference, which is a lot more difficult when scrolling about in a video.
No sarcasm here; you asked for some text-based resources and so I listed some that I know to be quality-- Paper copies of these books and some parts/breadboards to tinker with are how I learned the basics of electronics a couple of decades ago. The fundamentals haven't changed.
I’m so old that when I made circuits as a kid in the 1970s I literally mounted them on a wooden board like we used to cut bread on upstairs in the kitchen.
I have been known to use a piece of cardboard for a few small dead-bug circuits from time to time. Google used cardboard rather than cases to separate their early servers (IIRC the cardboard was on a shelf and the board on top, actually).
They suffer from contact wear, stray capacitance and inductance, unreliable contacts and rather non optimal signal routing. This slowly adds up to pending headaches like failing circuits and ones that can't be reproduced. Even the nice 3M ones are problematic.
Refer to https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appl... ... AN47-26 breadboarding techniques.
I tend to use single sided copper clad board and build stuff rats nest. Drill some holes through the board and screw it to the inside of a die cast box lid and for a one off it's good. Works fine up to 1GHz or so with some thinking unlike breadboards (1MHz if the planets are aligned appropriately). Also works for high voltage and high current stuff. If you have lots of digital, flip the ICs upside down and use kynar for signal routing.
Here's one I did last year where someone stole the internal oscillator out of an RF signal generator so I built one from the service manual schematics. Prototype: https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs ... This was "productionised" onto a custom PCB: https://imgur.com/WM44RYl