vero board vs PCB?

[Blueteeth]

Guess it depends on the chips you're using, the application etc.. I've found sometimes one can do a board with only a few holes, rather large (like CPLD's, FPGAs, uC's) but othertimes, you're right, depending on pinout and external connectors it can just ends up a massive headache. I hate doing via's, because it can be fiddly to get them to a reasonable profile.

One thing I forgot to add, with smt adapters, and stripboard, when you couple those with 'stacking' connectors' one can make quite a good modular system than plugs together, allowing entire 'circuits' to be knocked up, replacing one of those boards. Considering the extra time, and effort designing a PCB to be prototyping friendly, its not 'quick an dirty' but perhaps 'quicker, and 'less pretty'.

 

[DerStrom8]

My personal opinion: If your board is only going to be used by you, and/or placed inside a case, or going to be placed in a solid, sturdy place, use veroboard. It is cheap, readily accessible, and doesn't require much of a design process. PCBs are better for production items--things you plan to sell, and/or to leave out in the open, or that move around a lot. Overall, veroboard is able to be transformed into the final product more quickly, and the layout doesn't have to be precise. You don't need to worry about traces overlapping or anything like that. However, I wouldn't recommend veroboard in applications that move around, because if you're not careful with your wiring, you could produce shorts or broken wires. That's where a PCB would come in--most of the circuitry is protected.

That's my two cents, anyway.

 

[3v0]

Last I checked veroboard was rather uncommon in the US. We see a lot of proto board systems but not veroboard. I have not checked in quite some time.

 

[upand_at_them]

Yes, but you can mail-order from Futurlec for a reasonable price.

 

[audioguru]

Veroboard is stripboard. It has parallel strips of copper, not just solder pads.
The strips and a few jumper wires form half of a pcb and the parts form the other half.
The copper strips are cut to length with a special tool or a drill bit.

I designed thousands of circuits on Veroboard during my career. Most were made by my colleague, a craftsman. Some were extremely big and complicated. Most of my veroboard circuits were made only one time and they looked good enough to be sold. None ever failed.

Hi Sarma,
I will be 67 in less than three weeks. My eyes are still perfect because their lenses are only 4 years old (cataracts surgery).

 

[RichTheDude]

3V0 : as blueteeth says I think it depends a lot on the IC. Sometimes I have hardly any vias if the placement and the pinouts "flow well". Using FPGA's or CPLD's for logic really helps in this aspect you can pretty much choose any IO pin you fancy to aid in this.

As already mentioned Veroboard becomes problematic to work with at higher frequencies (I have had CPLDs running at about 50 MHz on them). For RF the manhattan style of building (albeit UGLY) comes into its own for prototypes as each pad can have a capacitance of a few pF (as the construction effectively puts two caps in series).

Seed studio and Sure electronics do some fairly cheap PCB deals. I tend to just design PCBs all the time now and get them made externally. Building complex circuits on vero can take ages, yet assembling an SMT PCB can be done pretty quickly - and is easily repeatable.

It all depends if you have plans on making more I guess...

 

[Mr RB]

Last I checked veroboard was rather uncommon in the US. We see a lot of proto board systems but not veroboard.
...

That's quite a shame considering its superiority in both speed and ease of use. With veroboard (stripboard)
you can use some of the long strips as power and ground busses, and signal busses etc as most of the discretes like resistors caps etc have one end on one of those busses.

I've done quick veroboard builds where there were very few jumpers. Comparing that to a padboard, the padboard would have needed many jumpers.

 

[audioguru]

I bought many pieces of dark blue epoxy-fiberglass Veroboard over the years. It did not warp like brown cheap phenolic-paper boards.

 

[mvs sarma]

while many of us get cheaper boards(single sided), there are houses that sell double sided pcbs with thro hole plating and green mask on fr4 grade copper clad.