Hot answers tagged breadboard
33
Areas where the common breadboard does poorly:
High voltage
High frequency (above 10MHz)
Where the additional breadboard capacitance would present problems (oscillators, etc)
Where glitches due to poor wire connections would result in poor operation
Where most of the parts are not through hole 0.1" (2.54mm) centers
For anything but on-the-bench prototyping ...
28
Back in the day, circuits were often constructed by wire-wrapping components onto nails driven into flat pieces of wood that resembled (or were?) breadboards.
There's a nice video demo by the Make Magazine people here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=HrG98HJ3Z6w
24
This terminology goes waaaaay back to the days of vacuum tubes.
Generally, you would mount a number of tube-sockets on standoffs to a piece of wood (the actual "breadboard"), and do all the wiring with point-point wire and the components just hanging between the various devices.
If you needed additional connection points, you would use a solder-lug terminal ...
13
Perhaps a better way to phrase the question would be when IS it ok to use a breadboard.
I'd say if the following cases are true it's probably ok to use a breadboard.
Rapid prototyping (not built to last)
Few connections external to the breadboard
Mostly thru-hole components
Low voltage <= 12VDC
Low frequency <= 10Mhz
There are a few exceptions for ...
13
Ignoring the shopping recommendation portion of the question...
This is how breadboards work out best for my particular uses:
A few long breadboards with the power strips along the sides (830 tie-points), such as the MB-102:
A larger number of the tiny 170 tie-point breadboards like the SYB-170, in assorted colors:
Each color denotes for me a type of ...
12
OK, you know the answer from The Photon.
"DIP" package (a pleonasm) stands for "Dual In-line Package", also abbreviated to "DIL", for "Dual In Line". They have been used for 50 years, but they're used less now than 20 years ago.
Almost all DIPs have a 0.1", or 100 mils, pitch, the distance between the pins. Small DIPs are 300 mils wide, larger ones often ...
11
You connected the DIP switches between Vcc and the AND gate's input, and that's wrong. A floating TTL input (DIP switches off) is seen as logical 1, and when you close the switch you just enforce that 1. So inputs are always seen a 1, and output will be 1, and the LED will light.
Two things:
connect the DIP switches between the inputs and ground
...
10
This looks like either a ceramic disk capacitor or a thermistor. Those two are easy to distinguish. Test it with a ohmmeter, and a capacitor will read like a open circuit. A thermistor will have some finite resistance. Then warm it up with your hand and see if it changes. Make sure to not be touching the leads when you measure it warm, else your body ...
10
I usually try to leave some room at one end, so I can insert a small screwdriver underneath the IC. Then just lift. Will bend the pins ever so slightly that it doesn't cause problems upon reuse.
Alternatively, Wiha seems to have chiplifters, a bit like a small crowbar:
This will need a bit less room.
10
Fritzing as suggested in a couple of answers will help you draw a nice wiring diagram, but it does not explain what's wrong with yours.
This is what you've made. R1 and R2 should be obvious: they connect directly between the battery's plus and minus terminals. R3 is a different matter. To understand that you have to know how a solderless breadboard is ...
10
Let's take a look at Diagram 2 on the link you posted, which shows how breadboards are wired internally.
Each red line represents a series of holes which are electrically connected together. Anything that's connected to holes in the same red line are thus connected to each other. Each horizontal row has two signal networks, one for each side of the board ...
9
I just got this one from Jameco a couple of months ago. It's nice to have the room to spare, and in my opinion, nicer than having separate smaller ones, especially considering the general notoriety breadboards have regarding intermittent connections.
9
Do not put 120VAC on a breadboard. While there's nothing preventing you from putting 120VAC on a beardboard, that's really dangerous so don't do that.
Get a perfboard to solder your relay in. Mount said perfboard with the relay into a plastic project enclosure box. That way, you won't accidentally short any of the relay contacts. Drill a hole in the box to ...
9
$0.02 worth
The metal part of the female connector (in which the wire is stuck) looks like a tuning fork. You don't see the fork, because it's surrounded by the black plastic. The fork should be in-plane with the connector. Try to make a hole in the plastic on the side of the connector. Perhaps, you could make the hole with a hot nail or a dremmel. The ...
8
There is a thing named resistance decade. It is like a programmable resistor, you can set the value and it precisely holds it. Costs about 100 to 1000 USD depending on precision and wattage.
Other cheaper solution is to buy a Resistor Assortment Kit. It includes 20-50 pcs of every value of resistors. You can find it on ebay from 10 USD
8
If built carefully and sensibly with shortest minimum lead lengths, short paths to power rails and proper decoupling and filtering then a breadboard can be not too much different than a PCB based supply. Good results can be expected and noise should not be vastly worse than a typical PCB based circuit.
If built as roughly as breadboard circuits often are ...
7
Sources and types of small DC motors:
Easy guide: if it has a motor and is solely battery operated it should be useful.
There are two main type of "DC" motors.
"Brush" motors that use a segmented commutator and brush contacts (often actually pieces of carbon) to keep the DC feed to the rotor in proper "alignment" with the magnetic field as the rotor ...
7
Some NTC thermistors look a lot like your part, e.g. this one from Vishay. You could try to connect it to an Ohm-meter and measure the resistance while applying heat to the body of the part. Maybe you can extract a typical NTC thermistor curve (K vs. Ohm) this way.
7
On a breadboard, take practically any old pointy thing that will fit in 'the gutter', and nudge it carefully under one end of the chip (that's what the gutter is for!) until it just starts to come up. Then move to the other end, and bring that end up a little more. At that point it should be loose enough to just pluck with your fingers.
Things with short ...
7
The 2 rails at the top of a breadboard are all connected along the straight line. In the picture, you are connecting both ends of the resistor to the same rail, so it's as if it's not even there (all the current will bypass it and travel through the LED).
It's the equivalent circuit of having the resistor ends connected (same voltage):
+---R---+ ...
7
My best luck with removing broken wires from breadboards and headers of this nature is to just use the tip of a jeweler's screwdriver, or the tip of one of the ends of my pair of diagonal cutters to just drag the wire out. You may nick up the header's plastic a little bit, but it is definitely easier to do this before you replace the header in case you can ...
6
The best way would be the adapter.
A quick way would be to take a dremel tool to the
Vector board and route a slot. Epoxy the 2mm sockets to the
board and then run jumper wires to Vector K24A pins.
If you do not have many pins you could take a wire-wrap header
with 0.1" centers and bend the leads on one end to 2mm centers.
Solder the socket to bent ...
6
Addressing the matter of "losing springiness", or more technically setting the springs by exceeding their yield strength, all that really matters is how much stress (pressure) you subject them to, which will depend on the strain (displacement). Over a very long time, they may take a set, but it would take years or extremely elevated temperatures.
...
6
Here's a picture of a board which had some headers forced into it which were too large, damaging the contacts:
The outer rows of the Sharpie'd area make intermittent contact, so we avoid the whole section. Notice that some of the numbers are rubbed off, and also notice the burnt spot at the top of the picture where something burned up.
The breadboard ...
6
Use of a double-throw switch can be very good for debouncing. Wire one throw to VDD and the other to VSS; wire the pole to an input, adding a small cap to ground. Even if there's some bounce on the contacts, the switch signal won't go high until the high-side contact is closed, and once it's gone high it won't go low until the low-side contact is closed. ...
6
At that frequency it will probably work, yet radiate like hell, have low efficiency and bad ripple rejection. None of it will be relevant when you move it to a PCB. And due to its bad performance I wouldn't use it to power a circuit with it, but rather stick to my bench power supply. You can only use it as a proof-of-concept, if you feel you need that.
...
6
If you want the thing you're making to be a "proper" Arduino shield, you can buy something like this "Protoshield" board from Adafruit:
http://www.adafruit.com/products/51
Other vendors sell similar boards. It's basically a bit of perfboard that's designed for mounting components, but with the header pins already setup to "stack" onto an Arduino.
If you ...
6
Works great for quick prototypes using through-hole resistors, capacitors, and DIPs with 22ga solid-core copper wire.
You need to be aware of the disadvantages though.
not meant for withstanding high voltages (don't plan on anything above 48V)
not meant for carrying high currents (I'd consider anything over 20mA questionable and anything over 100mA ...
6
This is some pretty old advice, and I don't know if it will be relevant for your micro, but about 4 years ago I did a project with a PIC18F which encountered strange spurious resets. After reading the report and re-jogging my memory here is what seems to have solved it:
Do you have the Low Voltage Programming Enable configuration bit enabled? Is your PGM ...
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