how do you do your soldering work? do you use a plain board or a horizontal-stripped copper board? which do you use when you've got to use lots of IC's? Would like to know how you do your stuff.

Definitely plain.

stripped board (or veroboard?) does not work with all applications. I cannot see it work with IC's if the board is only horizontally or vertically stripped.

Plain allows for the most flexibility. In fact, I made a less-than-perfect superregen receiver on a board, with an IC. The interesting part is that the dimensions were less than 5cm square. With a board with predefined tracks, or holes, I cannot see any possibility of large circuits on a small board.

Originally Posted by mstechca

Definitely plain.

stripped board (or veroboard?) does not work with all applications. I cannot see it work with IC's if the board is only horizontally or vertically stripped.

I've seen some people use the stripped for IC's but they had to cut between the IC's legs, since it was coppered horizontally. Without cutting it with a blade they'll inadvertently be shorting the IC legs together.

The plain allows for more compression but more soldering and wire work.

I have mounted ICs on Veroboard (stripboard) for more than 30 years.
I just cut the tracks between IC pin rows (I plan the wiring to avoid some cuts) with a track-cutter tool or drill-bit. Other tracks need to be cut anyway.
You can plan the strips of copper so that half the printed wiring of a pcb is done by the strips. The remaining wiring is done by lying-down resistors, capacitors or a few jumper wires.

The next thing I'd like to try is Manhattan style, or so it is called by some hobbyists. Not well suited to IC but good for discrete components. Little chunks of PCB are glued on to a larger PCB. The chunks serve as connection points for the various components. Sorry I haven't more time to explain but it looks like a nice technique for some applications.

I've only seen Manhattan used for RF too but it appears that it would work for other discrete component applications. For some circuits you could use bare (no copper) board as the base - where a ground plane is of no advantage or not desired.

Things I haven't sorted out yet with this technique - foil on "chunk" or island forms capacitor with ground plane below. The thickness of the board and relatively small size of the island suggest the value is small but it's still there. Maybe the copper is removed where the island is placed. Don't know for sure.

wow audioguru, if i'm not mistaken it's as if you plan your 'mounting' on graph paper b/4 doing all the soldering work...how do you go about that? what's the technique?

personally i'm thinking about plain (although it's less neat to do so much wiring) because the stripped one caused me a huge dissappointment earlier in the year... i was inadvertently connecting some parts of my circuit with others, i only found out the mistake after our presentation :cry:

Originally Posted by aibelectronics

wow audioguru, if i'm not mistaken it's as if you plan your 'mounting' on graph paper b/4 doing all the soldering work...how do you go about that? what's the technique?

Graph paper was a common technique (back in the 1970's) :lol:

Now I use Abacom's Lochmaster software instead.

But before that I was using Graph Paper Lite (which was free on a magazine cover disk) - this allows you to print out pretty well any kind of graph paper you like - and includes an option of printing veroboard layout paper :lol:

so such a technique has been around for quite a while
graph paper once occurred to me, but it was a moment's thought and then it was gone; i didn't give much thought on its feasibility or otherwise. you know the similarity b/w a veroboards matrix and a graph paper is something that must have occurred to anybody...
i'll look it up a bit.

Originally Posted by aibelectronics

so such a technique has been around for quite a while
graph paper once occurred to me, but it was a moment's thought and then it was gone; i didn't give much thought on its feasibility or otherwise. you know the similarity b/w a veroboards matrix and a graph paper is something that must have occurred to anybody...
i'll look it up a bit.

I read about it as a kid, I think it was in Practical Electronics?, either very early 70's, or late 60's? - I was at school anyway, and I left in 1971.

I like to exercise my brain with the puzzle of planning Veroboard layouts. I have software but prefer to take my graph paper where ever I go.

With plain perf board and many wires, it is difficult to change a part. With my Veroboard (stripboard), each wire has its own hole so changing parts is simple.

Laying out a circuit is especially challenging when it must fit into a certain confined space, like the one I showed and like my Plants Watering Watcher-2 project that is the same size as the holder for 2 AAA cells, using a daughter board. It was tricky to get the pins on the daughter board to line-up with the signals on the mother board.

Here's an example of the Veroboard 'paper' from Graph paper Lite, it's an EMF (Extended Windows Metafile) file.

Thanks Nigel,
I have that one but never used it. :lol: