How to use the breadboard. Bread board

When designing and assembling new electronic circuits their debugging is definitely required. It is carried out on a temporary circuit board, which allows you to freely arrange the components in order to ensure the possibility of quick and convenient replacement, and carrying out control and measurement work.

Parts in such a board can be attached by soldering, and the site itself will be called a prototyping board. In order not to once again expose the components to mechanical and thermal stress, assemblers and designers use a solderless breadboard. Often radio amateurs call this device a breadboard.

Solderless assembly breadboard allows mounting electrical circuit and run it without using a soldering iron. At the same time, you can check all the parameters and characteristics of the future device by connecting measuring and control devices to the board.

The breadboard is a plate of polymer material, which is a dielectric. Mounting holes are drilled on the plate in a certain order, into which the leads of parts - components of the future device should be inserted.

The holes allow the connection of leads with a diameter of 0.4-0.7 mm. They are located on the board, as a rule, with a step of 2.54 mm.

In order to simulate the connections of the component pins to each other, the breadboard has special conductive plates that connect the holes in a certain order.

As a rule, these connections are made in groups along the board along its long sides. There may be two or three such rows. These contact groups used as busbars for connecting power.

Between the longitudinal rows, the holes are connected by plates in groups of five. These plates are arranged in a direction across the board.

Near the holes in the places of future contacts, the conductive plates have design features, allowing you to clamp and firmly hold the leads of the parts, while ensuring the presence of electrical contact. This is the meaning of mounting without soldering.

High-quality breadboards allow assembly and disassembly while maintaining a strong and reliable connection between parts up to 50,000 times.

Prototyping boards produced industrial way and purchased in the distribution network, as a rule, have a layout of contacts and conductive connections between the holes.

How to use

In order to successfully and rationally use the breadboard, you must also have the following devices:

• several mounting wires with a diameter of 0.4-0.7 mm for installing various jumpers and connecting power;
• side cutters;
• pliers;
• tweezers.

Of course, a soldering iron is not needed for installation without soldering, but it may be needed to solder the wires to the power supply terminals if there are no detachable products. Sometimes soldering will have to be used for shielding.

Knowing the location of the conductive tracks on the breadboard, it is easy to mount any circuit and, by connecting it to a power source, check its operation. For assembly, you only need to insert the leads of the components into the terminals of the connectors and connect them in the desired sequence.

In this case, it is necessary to clearly understand the location of the conductive tracks in order to prevent short circuit. If it is necessary to make contacts between tracks on the breadboard, connectors are used.

If the conclusions of the parts do not fit the mounting holes in diameter, you can solder or wind up pieces of a suitable wire to them. Chips and components in BAG packages are installed in the center of the board.

Preparation and shielding

In order to work with a breadboard, especially if it is intended for solderless mounting, you first need to make preparatory work. This is especially true if the board has not been used for a long time.

Preparation includes cleaning the breadboard from dust. To do this, you can use a soft brush, and you can use a vacuum cleaner or a can of compressed air to clean the holes.

The next step is to ring the conductive tracks with a multimeter in order to avoid wasting time searching possible loss contact when wiring the circuit.

When debugging devices, they may not work correctly due to various interference and induced currents that occur during the operation of the circuit. To eliminate this phenomenon, it is necessary to apply breadboard shielding.

For this, a metal plate is used, attached from below and connected by soldering to a common bus, which will subsequently become negative.

For successful use breadboard for soldering and quick debugging, it is advisable to purchase several breadboards of different sizes.

First, it will allow you to collect complex schemes separate blocks, debugging each, and later connected into one device. Secondly, this way you can assemble additional devices that may be needed to control the operation of the main circuit.

It is better to purchase a prototyping board with a set of connecting wires. They are also called "jumpers".

But in some cases, you can save a significant amount if you buy a solderless board that is not equipped with connectors. In this case, they can be made independently from a suitable wire.

Ideal cable KSVV 4-0.5 used in the construction of systems fire alarm. This cable has 4 insulated strands of thin copper wire with a diameter of 0.5 mm. One meter of cable will be enough to get a lot of connecting jumpers.

During installation, it is always necessary to securely connect all the terminals of semiconductors and microcircuits. Even if any pins are not used, they must be connected to a common bus to avoid induced currents.

When using prototyping boards, you can only use low-current parts that operate on a voltage of no more than 12 V. Connect to a prototyping board alternating current voltage of 220 V from the household power supply is prohibited.

Proper use of a solderless breadboard will greatly simplify the assembly of the entire circuit and reduce the cost of manufacturing the device in which such a circuit will be used.

All people in the world, young and old, know that before you create something, you must first create a model of this "something", be it a model of a building, a stadium, or even a small rural toilet. In electrical engineering, this is called a prototype. A prototype is a working model of a device. Therefore, experienced electronics engineers, before assembling a device according to a scheme on the Internet, laid out by someone and do not understand why, must make sure that this scheme really works. Therefore, the circuit must be quickly assembled and made sure that it works, that is, to assemble layout. Well, in order to assemble it, we just need bread board.

Types of breadboards

Thick cardboard

A long time ago, when you were not even in the plans, our grandfathers, and maybe grandmothers, you never know :-), used thick cardboard. This is the fastest and cheap way schema checks. Holes were cut in the cardboard for the conclusions of the radioelements and, on the other hand, they were connected with the help of wires and other elements, if they did not fit on the front side. It looked something like this:

A is the front side, B is the reverse side.

Everything would be fine, but you had to solder the conclusions, make sure that nothing closes anywhere, and while you are “sculpting” this circuit, you can even inadvertently get confused :-). Yeah, it's not pretty either.

Homemade breadboards

I still found these times on the radio club. Back then we made breadboards ourselves. They took a sharp cutter and cut squares on a foil textolite. Then they were covered with solder.

If it was necessary to connect the tracks somewhere, we simply made jumpers between the squares with a drop of solder. It turned out good quality and beautiful. If it was too lazy to solder the radio elements to a normally wired board with tracks, they simply left it as is and used the device.

Disposable breadboards

Manufacturers still “sniffed” this business, or, as they say in economics, demand creates supply. Ready-made mock-up scarves began to appear one-sided and even double-sided for any size and taste.

By the way, they can be found on Ali immediately whole set .

The holes are very conveniently matched to the size of the pins of the microcircuits, as well as other radio elements. Therefore, it is very convenient to assemble and test radios on such breadboards. electronic device. And yes, they are inexpensive.

The reverse side of such breadboards with ready-made devices will look something like this:

What are the disadvantages of these breadboards? Still, it is better to use them once, because with repeated use, patches can fly off from them, which will lead to its unsuitability.

Solderless Breadboards

Progress walks with its confident step in our world, and now the market has appeared solderless breadboards.

They cost a little more than simple disposable breadboards, but to be honest, it's worth it.

They are very convenient in terms of installing parts, as well as their connection with each other. Wires no larger than 0.7 mm and no less than 0.4 mm in diameter can be inserted into such breadboards. To find out which holes and tracks are ringing among themselves, we check this whole thing. For construction big schemes(suddenly you will develop some kind of control unit for the hadron collider) you can add the same breadboards back to back. For this there are special ears. One move, and the breadboard will become a bit larger.

Well, what breadboard can be without connecting wires? Connecting wires, or jumpers ( from English- jump), needed to connect the radio components on the breadboard itself.

A little later, I bought these jumpers from Aliexpress. They are much more convenient than wire:

Everything is simple here, we take the jumper and insert it with a slight movement of the hand

Let's assemble the simplest circuit for turning on an LED through a button on a breadboard

This is how she will look

Set the power supply to 5 volts and press the button. The LED lights up bright green. So the scheme is workable, and we can use it at our discretion.

Conclusion

Solderless breadboards are taking over the world. Any scheme on them can be assembled and disassembled in a matter of minutes. After assembling and testing the circuit on a breadboard, you can safely proceed to assemble it in its pure form. I think that every self-respecting electronics engineer should have such a breadboard. But keep in mind, it’s better not to check circuits with a large current in the circuit, since the contacts of breadboard scarves can simply burn out - Joule-Lenz law. Good luck in the development and design of electronic devices!

Where to buy a breadboard

A breadboard with flexible jumpers and even a ready-made 5 Volt power supply can be immediately bought as a kit on Aliexpress. Choose to your taste and color!

If you don’t want to, then the easiest way would be to buy a one-time breadboard and assemble a finished device on it:

Very often in amateur radio practice, it becomes necessary to assemble and test this or that electronic device in order to check its performance and evaluate functionality. It is quite inconvenient to do this with a canopy, and there is a certain probability that while you are soldering one radio component, the other falls off at that time. Cheap Chinese breadboards are also not very convenient, due to the low service life and the inability to re-solder the radio components several times. I bring to your attention practical example how to make a do-it-yourself breadboard from a piece of foil textolite that will serve a radio amateur for at least a couple of years.

The board is used to simulate both logical circuits and analog ones using microcircuits, the number of legs of which can reach up to 18. A socket is soldered into the board for comfortable work with various microcircuits. I usually use this fee when I need to quickly check the work homemade device on PIC controllers. It seems to me that this design is very convenient, if there is not enough area of ​​printed pads, then it can be increased by closing the gaps with a drop of solder.

This design is made of a piece of fiberglass with riveted copper pins. Such pins can either be soldered from old radio structures, or made with your own hands from copper wire with a diameter of approximately 1.2-1.3 mm. Thinner pins will not fit, because they bend a lot, and thicker ones remove too much heat from the soldering iron tip when soldering. This "dummy" allows you to repeatedly assemble and remake various radio structures. If the connections are made with a wire made of fluoroplastic insulation MGT, then they will last for many years. copper wire can be taken from a conventional wire.

In non-foiled fiberglass, holes are made into which strips of tin are threaded

Bread board. Surely many and you know firsthand what it is. And someone recently came across this concept. If expressed plain language, a breadboard is a piece of textolite or other electrically conductive material, divided into squares or other shapes. Subsequently, parts are soldered onto these "squares". It is very convenient to debug circuits on a prototyping board. Its main difference from the printed circuit board is the absence of holes that prevent the quick replacement of a non-working part when setting up the circuit. In order not to transfer textolite to a printed circuit board, you first need to make sure that the circuit is working and assemble it on a “breadboard”. And if the circuit is successfully repeated, then in this case it is already possible to etch the printed circuit board and mount the parts on it.

So, we begin our master class on self-production of a breadboard. Whoever has the money will buy a ready-made one from China, but you and I are used to doing everything with our own hands! I must say right away that you make a prototyping board once - for several years! That is, it is reusable and you can debug dozens or even hundreds of electrical circuits on it. For self-manufacturing"Breadboard" we need a small piece of any one-sided or double-sided textolite. The sizes you choose yourself, as you like. I took about 10 * 15 cm. We will also need a cutter in order to cut the copper foil into squares. I didn’t have one, so I used a regular clerical knife. A ruler, for pre-marking the board, and a soldering iron, for applying tin to these same squares. In the photo, I marked the textolite into squares 5 * 5 mm in size.

When the markup is completed, we proceed directly to cutting. I applied the ruler tightly to the textolite and drove the knife back and forth, then you can swipe it a couple of times with a sharp screwdriver. That is to say, for reinforcement.

The paths are completely cut. Now you can start cleaning the board. For these purposes, I used an ordinary "zero" - a very fine skin. We don’t press hard, otherwise you will rip off all the copper!

After the board shines, which means it is cleaned of dirt and oxides, the surface must be additionally degreased with alcohol. If you do not have it in your arsenal, then any fat-removing liquid such as acetone and the like will do.

Everything - the cooking process is completed. Let's start tinning the board. Rosin took dry and a soldering iron with a flat tip, they are more convenient.

After the breadboard is fully tinned, carefully check it again for short circuits between the "squares", this will protect you in the future from non-working circuits. This is what the breadboard looks like after tinning with solder:

I didn’t specifically wash off the dried rosin, as it will protect our board from oxidation and the parts will be easier to solder. When assembling and testing the circuit, the elements must be installed closer to the center of the "squares", again to avoid short circuits.

I hope that my master class will be useful to you, and the setup of devices will be reduced in time, in view of the fact that it is very easy to replace parts on a prototyping board than on a printed one. Alex1 was with you.

Progress, as you know, does not stand still. Especially in electronics.
In our time, when half a computer can be easily placed on a square centimeter of the board, and special programs allow you to virtually “run in” the developed device without ever picking up a soldering iron and tester, this article may seem hopelessly outdated.
But who knows - maybe it will come in handy for some beginners.

Well, let the experienced ones take this text as another tale about how the surviving radio destroyers live in the wilderness ( Far East, very distant), where civilization, I think, will reach oh, how not soon.

Do you remember how it all started…

I hope that many of the respected Datagorians remember their first steps into electronics. Remember what their first receivers, amplifiers or oscillators looked like before they were fully tested, tuned, assembled on printed circuit boards and placed in cases.

In our area in the 80s, the situation was like this (in others, I think, also): simpler circuits were a “web” of wires and parts, which is sometimes scary to breathe on.

For more complicated schemes, a piece of the board was taken. Contact pads were cut out of tin and nailed to the same board in rows.
Perhaps, somewhere in the shed of my parents, such a product is still stored. It was on such prototyping boards that radio amateurs in our area, and not only in our area, assembled and tuned their first designs. They measured and adjusted the modes of transistors, achieved the required parameters, or at least just work, before the product got (or did not get) on a normal board, then into the case and pleased its creator.

Really - quickly, cheaply and cheerfully. I will not talk about the shortcomings of such a "test bench". Everyone who has ever used it already knows this. Sometimes in magazines like "Radio" or "MK" there were tips on making breadboards from foil getinax or textolite. An example from "MK":

Shhzzz! Him and on simple printed circuit boards it was not always possible to scrape together. Most of them were made by the “non-printed editing” mentioned in my article before last. And I didn’t see the point in fencing a product that would last “one and a half times” as a result of losing all the sites.

Around that time, a design was invented, which will be discussed below. Although "invented" is too strong a word. Rather, it was made on the basis of similar publications in the same Radio, MK and YUT, taking into account local conditions.

Here is an example from the appendix to " For young technician» for 1985

If I'm not mistaken, he migrated there from the Radio magazine of the 70s, along with all the shortcomings, such as the free rotation of the contact pads in the holes and because of this huge (even by the standards of the 80s) distances between them. This design was taken as a basis. True, in the manufacture it was necessary to abandon the "bells and whistles" and, if possible, get rid of the shortcomings of the "prototype".

Unfortunately, at the time when such a prototyping board was produced for the last time (about a year ago), there was no camera at hand. Therefore, I will have to limit myself to the drawings and explanations crookedly made by me.

Without a single nail

1. A piece of getinax or textolite that is suitable in size is taken.

Naturally, unfoiled. Otherwise, it could have been done much faster. And it would have turned out more beautiful, but I strongly doubt the durability of such a product. Foil has a bad habit of peeling off the base when heated.
Dimensions are determined by "customer requirements" and available pieces of material. Once I had a "monster" about 20x40 cm. It's a pity I lost it. This is now small did. On the large scale until I waver. You can solder the block on a couple of transistors. Or even something sound on a microcircuit, since they don’t have so many conclusions now, and body kits too.

2. With an awl, knife, or some other suitable tool, the markings for future contact pads are “scratched” on the surface of the material. The dimensions indicated in the figure were drawn from my product. If anyone needs it, others can do it.

3. According to the markup, holes with a diameter of 2 - 3 mm are drilled in place of future contact pads (for pads 5 mm wide, as in my case).

4. And then the holes on the board are given this shape.

For this purpose, I had to make a tool from a fragment of a hacksaw blade for metal. The chip was turned on emery like this.

Instead of such a self-made "jigsaw" it is quite possible to use a triangular file. The shape of the holes will be a little different, but they will perform their task (to prevent the rotation of the petals) in the same way. Only there were no needle files at hand at that time. And the drill was found only 1.5 mm. Therefore, absolutely smooth through grooves were obtained.

6 And then strips 5 mm wide are cut from a suitable tin. In my case, it was the famous tin from cans of condensed milk.

7. The strips are cut into pieces about 24 mm long (for 8x5 mm pads). The blanks are bent like this:

The resulting products are inserted into the above holes:

And they are fixed.

The result is something like this.

Now you can safely solder your design (if it does not exceed the size of the board or is not assembled on subminiature components). Measure and drive modes, make changes to the circuit. And when it works as it should, develop a signet, case, etc.

Because of sticking out reverse side tin boards need to work, naturally on a dielectric surface. Well, do not allow metal to get under the board. In this sense, a board with tins compares favorably if the nails are not too long: smile:
For a greater guarantee, you can attach a piece of textolite (getinaks) of the same size to the board from below. Or adjust the legs as in the picture from "UT", if the board is large enough.

I agree that everything can be done a little easier. For example, the "design" of pads. (I myself once made a variant where the tin blank was simply bent in half.)
Yes, and the board itself can be made even from cardboard, if something new is not done so often and there is no risk of overheating it during operation. In it, the grooves for the platforms are cut much easier. (I once used it, though for several other purposes.)

And you may not do it at all. But maybe it will be useful for someone. You never know.

And in the end - a photo of the board "in action". That is, during the check of the block for the next product.

It was far from civilization, normal devices, instruments and radio components. So do not be too surprised by the "museum exhibits" from which everything is collected. Everything was done only for the selection of the coil, so the type of other elements did not play a role. In addition, close friends had an oscilloscope that allows you to control the signal at radio frequencies, which for me still remains in plans and dreams.
The receiver standing in the background in this case acts as a frequency counter.

On the this moment made two such boards. I hope that they will be useful for the preparation of future articles.

P.S. A few memories, not quite on the topic

In distant school and student times, the “idea” embedded in the breadboard described in the article was very useful in the absence of foil materials.
Quite tired of twisting wires, I began to assemble not very complex circuits, soldering parts on tin pads and tracks installed in the right places on the board, in general, I did something in between printed and hinged mounting. Of course, the method is not without drawbacks, but servicing the product, replacing faulty parts, and making changes to the circuit is faster and more convenient than on a standard “signet”.
Until now, several artifacts made in this exotic way have been preserved: