Solderless breadboard sizes

Question

I wanted to know about solderless breadboard sizes; a standard solderless breadboard has five holes in a row.

There are a lot of options to get a bigger workspace, like assembling two solderless breadboards, or buying a metal plate with multiple breadboards, but those have the same issue: The need of carrying a metal support or a connector to stick the breadboards together. If one would need a robust and elementary solderless breadboard to carry around, something wider to prototype, assembling two breadboards can be tricky. Such case may happen if the five holes are already used or if large components have to be installed (microcontrollers, relays, etc.)

I couldn't find anything but six pins standard online or suggestions to 3D print or cut breadboards.

Why are there not a lot of other formats, how are sellers not even making profit on that? Where can I get other sizes for my solderless breadboard? Can I? Do I have to stick with assembling or 3D printing?

Answer 1

So are there a lot of other formats online, or are there only a few worldwide sellers that produce other sizes?

If I view your question literally, I think it is more complicated than being either one or the other. I think, however, that I understand what you’re getting at – why do so many of the solderless breadboards we see have five-hole electrical contact strips as the rows? [I guess you found a few with six-hole rows.] Example here from Guide to Solderless Breadboards

The answer to the first part of the question, “are there a lot of other formats online” is; with respect to the characteristic in question, no, there are not. If there were, you would likely have already found them or others would have quickly pointed them out.

That begs the question, why not?

While I am certain that I am not a solderless "breadboard historian", I am, apparently, willing to try to address the question.

I believe that the integral issue to understand is the evolution of the concept of a breadboard. The name comes from the similarity to wooden breadboards used at the dinner table to hold the loaf of bread for cutting and serving. So, why not also use something like those, which were cheap and available, to assemble electronic components – and folks did, like this one, from The Evolution of Breadboards

From there, it seemed reasonable to start producing prototype boards that had patterns to accommodate soldering the components on the boards and especially DIP ICs, as they became widely available and popular.

Then, we get to the “solderless” breadboard, which seems a logical extension of the previous prototype solder boards. In a sense, I think that the onset of the popularity of the solderless breadboard also correlated with the continued increase in availability of the DIP IC. The advance was that they were not intended to be permanent - you could make multiple attempts at constructing the circuit without going through the soldering part - an extension of the plug board.

Having four connection points for each pin was enough for most, but not all, situations the customer might encounter. Similarly, the width of the separation between adjacent rows was intended to accommodate the width of many of the available DIP ICs, with even the larger pin ICs leaving a few connection points.

Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Breadboards and the list of patents – especially the the last one from the early 1970s. Maybe that one gave rise to the beginning of the pseudo-standard that we see so frequently.

So why are you feeling left with the alternatives of having to “3D print or cut breadboards”?

Perhaps it is a simple matter of being caught between principles of "Necessity is the Mother of Invention", giving rise to the solderless breadboard initially, and subsequently leading to the current pseudo-standard ; and "Customer Need is the Impetus for Design Evolution" not [yet?] resulting in low cost alternatives of infinite variety.

In other words, given the various ways folks come up with to address the need when it does occur, e.g. cutting solderless breadboards to accommodate the width of some embedded controllers, or just using the availability and variety of prototype solder boards, and female header sockets, it may be that the need is simply not great enough for a manufacturer to make a profit.

That’s what I think anyways.

Answer 2

You mentioned:

The need of carrying a metal support or a connector to stick the breadboards together

This is actually not correct. See those little dimples on the side of the breadboard? They connect together with more breadboards. Put two breadboards side by side, put the outie-dimples of one under the innie-dimples of the other, and push them together vertically. All 4 sides should have dimples (2 innie and 2 outie) so you can stack them in both directions.

If you have an adhesive backing, you may need to trim a little bit underneath the innie-dimples since they don't cut holes for that. The adhesive backing is added last in the manufacturing process so it covers up all the connection points.

In fact, it looks like your breadboard already comes in 3 parts - two power rail sections, and the middle dual-5-hole section. You can pull those apart and mix-and-match however you want. Fully customizable breadboards! Again, the adhesive backing may get in the way when you try to separate them so you may need to cut it.

For lots of connections to the same node, take some of those extra power strip parts (I'm sure you don't need 2 sets of power rails in the middle every time you stack 2 breadboards together) and put a whole bunch of them together and now you have a really long breadboard with 25 holes per row.

Oh and did I mention adhesive backing? Yes, peel off the covering layer and then stick your entire breadboard arrangement onto whatever surface you like. It probably should be a metal sheet because if you want to take it off again, the glue will never come cleanly off cardboard. You can get metal sheets at the hardware store. But you asked how you could not do that, so don't if you don't want to.

Answer 3

A search for “large breadboard” on Google yields many larger breadboard formats. Here are just three examples:

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(There a many other formats which are the equivalent of 2, 3 or 4 basic breadboards side by side, but as a single board)

Each row still has 5 contacts (you just end up with up to 8 rows on the same line rather than just two), but you would need more only to connect more pins/components together, and you can still use wires for that if needed (and wire to a separate free row if needed).

This should accommodate both a relative large number of components and larger components (though I’d be curious to see what components you would plug directly into a breadboard which would need that much width — beyond a certain width boards are more likely to have female headers on top rather than male headers on the bottom).