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.

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Everybody can but not everybody will.

 

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.

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-=: The best low-priced components to troubleshoot with are the speaker and the LED :=-

 

For small circuits (say 100 parts or less)
1) Sometimes piece of copperclad PCB. Mill, drill out what I dont need with a dremel tool. Deadbug/skywire SMT parts together. Careful with short lengths & using ground plane for high speed stuff. I've found it works good with high speed signals.

2) Sometimes just blank FR4 & use copper tape to creat planes & tracks. Cut away tape I dont need. Deadbug/skywire parts again

3) On occasion I will use pre-drilled, plated through hole PCB mostly if the parts are large (DIP, older styles). If I need planes, I put down copper tape.

For large circuits
1)Use Eagle or PCB123 and at work, I use cadence/allegro OR hand it to the CAD designer. :lol:

 

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.

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Everybody can but not everybody will.

 

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.

Attached Images

veroboard.png (357.3 KB, 928 views)

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Uncle $crooge

 

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.

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stevez

 

I've only seen the Manhattan technique used for radio circuits. Probably because of the huge ground plane.

Mike

 

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.

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stevez

 

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:

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Everybody can but not everybody will.

 

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:

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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.

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Everybody can but not everybody will.

 

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.

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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.

Attached Images

plants_layout_contrast_adj.jpg (57.9 KB, 806 views)

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Uncle $crooge

 

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

Attached Files

veroboard.zip (10.9 KB, 163 views)

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

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Uncle $crooge