[HN Gopher] How to use a Breadboard. How do breadboards work? (2...
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How to use a Breadboard. How do breadboards work? (2021) [video]
Author : peter_d_sherman
Score : 78 points
Date : 2023-08-21 14:39 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| beaker52 wrote:
| I would have found it much more intuitive to understand had the
| breadboard been in the vertical orientation.
| cmacleod4 wrote:
| Make sure your knife is sharp. Let freshly-baked bread cool
| before attempting to slice. Wash the board after use.
|
| Simple!??
| wilgertvelinga wrote:
| Even more in-depth from the magnificent Ben Eater:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-_rJqvDhQ
| theSuda wrote:
| Also this one from years ago is my favorite:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WReFkfrUIk Learned a lot of
| basics with this one.
| Renaud wrote:
| For those wanting to tinker but laking access to the equipment,
| there are breadboard simulators.
|
| Surprisingly capable.
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Related: Steve Morrison's BBCircuits (Breadboard Circuits)
| channel on YouTube (which looks like a great channel for anyone
| interested in electronics!):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@BBCircuitsbySteveMorrison/videos
| nottorp wrote:
| Sheesh. Any resources in old school text plus some piccies
| format?
| kd5bjo wrote:
| https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/
|
| https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims/
|
| https://archive.org/details/555-designs
|
| https://archive.org/details/engineersminin00mims
| nottorp wrote:
| Sarcasm I see.
|
| The video referred by the original post is 5 minutes long
| so I could probably scan the equivalent text in 1 minute.
| More, I could use a text version as reference, which is a
| lot more difficult when scrolling about in a video.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| No sarcasm here; you asked for some text-based resources
| and so I listed some that I know to be quality-- Paper
| copies of these books and some parts/breadboards to
| tinker with are how I learned the basics of electronics a
| couple of decades ago. The fundamentals haven't changed.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Some excellent links; thank you very much!
|
| (Yes, I remember Forrest Mims (as an author) from "the old
| Radio Shack days" (where his books were primarily found,
| back in the day...) He was a great author of electronics
| related texts. It's nice to see his works preserved
| online!)
| baz00 wrote:
| 30 years experience says the best way to use a breadboard is
| don't use one.
|
| They suffer from contact wear, stray capacitance and inductance,
| unreliable contacts and rather non optimal signal routing. This
| slowly adds up to pending headaches like failing circuits and
| ones that can't be reproduced. Even the nice 3M ones are
| problematic.
|
| Refer to https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-
| documentation/appl... ... AN47-26 breadboarding techniques.
|
| I tend to use single sided copper clad board and build stuff rats
| nest. Drill some holes through the board and screw it to the
| inside of a die cast box lid and for a one off it's good. Works
| fine up to 1GHz or so with some thinking unlike breadboards (1MHz
| if the planets are aligned appropriately). Also works for high
| voltage and high current stuff. If you have lots of digital, flip
| the ICs upside down and use kynar for signal routing.
|
| Here's one I did last year where someone stole the internal
| oscillator out of an RF signal generator so I built one from the
| service manual schematics. Prototype: https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs
| ... This was "productionised" onto a custom PCB:
| https://imgur.com/WM44RYl
| kd5bjo wrote:
| There are plenty of projects for which solderless breadboards
| are unsuitable, but there are also lots for which they're
| perfectly fine. Lots of hobbyists and most professionals will
| outgrow solderless breadboards sooner or later, but they're
| still a good place to get started.
| baz00 wrote:
| Spend an hour in an undergrad EE lab helping people with
| fucked up breadboards and you change your mind rapidly. Same
| goes for hobbyists but they don't have someone to help them
| available.
|
| I've seen people chewed up for hours debugging a circuit and
| find it's a breadboard problem.
| JohnFen wrote:
| Yeah, I wouldn't use them in that sort of setting.
|
| I do use breadboards for quickly checking out relatively
| simple, low-frequency circuits. But if the circuit appears
| to be malfunctioning, I suspect the breadboard first (after
| double-checking the circuit wiring). I also think of
| breadboards as being consumables, and as soon as one gives
| the slightest whiff of trouble, I get rid of it.
|
| I think they're very useful tools, but you need to be aware
| of how iffy they actually are and use them appropriately.
| 0xmarcin wrote:
| I think they selling point is that you do not have to solder.
| Soldering is not for everyone: you need expensive equipment,
| soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is quite
| harmful to your health, young kids should not solder.
|
| I used breadboard to play with electronics during winter in my
| small appartment at that time. No troubles with fumes, no need
| to buy expensive soldering station, no need to safely get rid
| of tin with lead. This was a good way to start, now I own a
| soldering station but now I also know that I need it about 2 or
| 3 a month.
| JohnFen wrote:
| > you need expensive equipment
|
| Basic soldering equipment is quite inexpensive. A basic
| soldering iron can be had for about the same price as a small
| breadboard. The good stuff gets pricey, but if you aren't
| doing a lot of soldering, you don't need the good stuff.
|
| > soldering in an appartment without proper ventilation is
| quite harmful to your health
|
| If you have a window and aren't soldering frequently, it's
| not really all that bad.
|
| > young kids should not solder.
|
| Why not? I was taught to solder when I was 8, and I'm very
| grateful for that.
| everyone wrote:
| I super recommend to anyone, getting the Arduino starter kit, and
| going through the projects book. Most fun I'd had in ages + a
| great hands on way to begin to understand how electronics are not
| magic. https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-
| multi-...
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| Also Raspberry Pi (the Coke to Arduino's Pepsi). More expensive
| (especially since hoarders have been bulk ordering them and
| jacking up the price), but IMO more flexible and powerful.
|
| https://www.raspberrypi.com/
|
| There are several others, but Arduino and Raspberry Pi seem to
| be the ones with the widest variety of "it just works" add-on
| components and programming tutorials.
| brewtide wrote:
| I just got my son the "30 days lost in space" inventr.io kit
| (not associated at all with them). It seems more pricey than
| your standard Arduino kit for sure, but provides a (pretty
| lame..) story of the why things are being built.
|
| Point being, as his first (and close to my first) experience
| with breadboards and programming, he is loving it and having
| the programming aspect and electronics aspect combined into
| "this code makes this thing do this" makes it FAR more
| interesting for him. I doubt it'll be his passion in life (but
| who knows) but it's certainly helping him pay attention to
| details and he is certainly learning a good bit about designing
| some simple circuits. Would recommend.
|
| (Unrelated, but he also got a build your own am/fm radio kit
| and he successfully soldered all the bits he needed to, having
| never soldered before and only ended up with one good burn on
| his hand at the last connection to be made, the negative
| battery!)
|
| Confidence building things, and a great way of teaching "you
| can relatively do anything, you just have to practice!". You
| could see the pride when he flicked the switch and noise was
| made.
|
| Same , slower, pride on every day he's "lost in space".
| atoav wrote:
| I run an electronic lab at a university -- I have the following
| tips:
|
| - don't cheap out on breadboards unless you plan to manually test
| every single connection regularily before prototyping
|
| - with some breadboards the (red/blue) power rails are not
| connected all the way through, but only for half of the board, in
| doubt always measure. If this is the case with your board, just
| bridge the rails once and leave them bridged forever.
|
| - if you prototype projects more often get yourself sortiments
| (e.g. a resistors, film capacitors, ceramic capacitors,
| electrolytic capacitors). Yes, these sortiments are expensive,
| but my first private resistor sortiment lasted me for a decade
| and if you calculate a decade worth of "fuck that part is
| missing" it is a no-brainer. I literally never regreted getting
| those.
|
| - if you constantly find yourself using certain connectors build
| a (heavy) breakout-box for them. Something that doesn't fly off
| the table easily. Having your breadboard fly of the table because
| your guitar is connected to it is bullshit.
|
| - there are limits to breadboarding. If you go high voltage, high
| current and/or high frequency or anything extra sensitive avoid
| it
|
| - learn how to translate between schematics and breadboards.
| Nowadays there are many breadboard-illustrations that show you
| exactly how to connect things. That is neat, but ot is hard to
| reason about circuits that way, and this will be needed once you
| deciate from what you find. Most interesting circuits will come
| as schematics anyways, so learning it is worth it
|
| - if you breadboard complex schematics, print out the schematic
| and tick off (with a pen) _every_ connection between _every_ pin
| of _every_ component you make. It is very easy to miss something
| even for professionals. In the end a circuit is basically just
| nodes (a single pin of a component) and edges (the connections
| between them). If you get the topology right, the circuit should
| work. Exceptions: the schematic is wrong (not uncommon, there is
| a lot of crap on the internet), the parts are wrong (there is
| many nuances to each part, beyond their basic value) or the
| circuit is of a kind that is not suited for breadboarding (see
| above).
|
| - Sometimes people online claim that X works, but it only works
| because the part they had lying around had a very specific
| characteristic that they conceniently failed to mention. It is
| okay to just give up and move on at some point
|
| - Try to simulate schematics before you breadboard them. Change
| component values to get a basic intuition for the circuit. I like
| this one: https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html (it has
| some limitations, e.g. inverter based relaxation oscillators
| won't oscillate, but for the most stuff this is fine)
|
| - don't forget to add bypass caps. Just get a sack of ceramic
| 100nF capacitors and sprinkle them between plus and ground on the
| power rails next to wherever tou put active components (chips,
| etc)
| ggm wrote:
| I'd love to get an explanation behind the last one. It can be
| very hard for a non player to understand how connecting power
| rails like this does anything positive, and why it works better
| closer to the active element in question.
| sheepshear wrote:
| Small caps near a chip are like an L1 current cache for all
| the transitor switching events.
| ggm wrote:
| So it imparts hysteresis and prevents parasitic events in
| current switching contexts? Would you still need these if
| somehow the circuit was a low frequency continuous wave
| function? If feels like these are a side effect of digital
| use, high speed switching states.
| thsksbd wrote:
| The power rails have a non zero impedance (as in not DC), and
| large currents flow through the rails.
|
| These currents will create voltages that will seem to be
| noise to anything connected to them.
|
| The caps provide a low Z path to ground so the currents so
| your rails are stable.
|
| Circuits really need schematics though, so its kinda hard to
| explain w/out. The fundamental idea is easy enough, but
| dealing with this properly is very hard.
| 0x0203 wrote:
| Do you have some suggestions on what sort of sortiments you
| like? It seems like many of the common component assortment
| kits readily available, while having several hundred pieces,
| only have a handful of any particular value component, which
| tends to run out rather quickly after only a project or two.
| kd5bjo wrote:
| My general approach is to start with a small-to-moderate
| assortment kit, and after each project restock the bins that
| are running low/empty with individual-value orders of 100
| components or so-- Those are the values you're using a lot
| of, and so it makes sense to stock them more heavily.
|
| I'd also recommend getting a kit of fixed-length jumper
| wires; it's much easier to analyze what you've built and turn
| it back into a circuit diagram when the wire connections are
| short enough to follow at a glance instead of chasing wires
| through a ratsnest.
| pwg wrote:
| Breadboard specific cut and formed wires such as these:
| https://www.amazon.com/AUSTOR-Lengths-Assorted-Preformed-
| Bre... [1] will make both wiring, and verifying, bread-
| boarded circuits much easier. Plus the actual circuit will
| be much neater with these wires interconnecting everything.
|
| [1] just the first example I found from a quick search
| atoav wrote:
| Just get one of those where you have ~10 to 20 of each and
| get replacements for the ones you suspect to burn through
| fast (e.g. 1k, 4k7, 10k, 100k and similar common ones). But
| them in a drawer and refill when you need it.
|
| I had one from a German reseller that doesn't exist anymore.
| For the university I made my own sortiment buy buying
| resistors and sorting them into boxes myself. It took 4 days
| to sort it, which is probably what you pay for when you get a
| sortiment.
| 0xmarcin wrote:
| I only want to add that you need resistors with slightly ticker
| leads. Most of the cheap resistors have either too soft leads
| or too thin and they do not provide a good contact with the
| breadboard.
|
| I use quite expensive (comparing to noname resistors) Velleman
| Sets similar to: https://www.amazon.com/Velleman-
| RES-E12-Pack-E12-Resistors/d...
|
| The same applies to wires that you use for the connections. Do
| not buy the very thin ones. An example of what I use:
| https://www.adafruit.com/product/3175
|
| Jumpers are good but if you have to do a lot of wiring (e.g. 8
| address lines + 8 data lines) then using custom cut wires is
| the best.
| fatnoah wrote:
| > don't forget to add bypass caps. Just get a sack of ceramic
| 100nF capacitors and sprinkle them between plus and ground on
| the power rails next to wherever tou put active components
| (chips, etc)
|
| 100 years ago when I did my EE undergrad, one big project for a
| class was to build a very basic 8088 system that would read a
| boot instruction and then write/read a memory address, with
| verification via logic analyzer. I painstakingly assembled that
| thing on my breadboard and noted that it only worked one out of
| every 10-15 attempts. Adding some decoupling capacitors solved
| the problem. I wish I had a camera back then. I meticulously
| cut, bent, arranged, and otherwise made the thing look
| beautiful as part of the effort.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. These are really good advices.
|
| I stopped dabbing into electronics last year due to lack of
| time, and I'm absolutely sure this is one of the reasons I was
| scratching my head:
|
| > - learn how to translate between schematics and breadboards.
| Nowadays there are many breadboard-illustrations that show you
| exactly how to connect things. That is neat, but ot is hard to
| reason about circuits that way, and this will be needed once
| you deciate from what you find. Most interesting circuits will
| come as schematics anyways, so learning it is worth it
|
| I found it particularly hard to translate if the schematics
| uses multiple grounds and single line power sources. I found it
| difficult to figure out whether the components are linked
| serially or parallel.
| gumby wrote:
| I'm so old that when I made circuits as a kid in the 1970s I
| literally mounted them on a wooden board like we used to cut
| bread on upstairs in the kitchen.
| JohnFen wrote:
| I remember mounting my circuits on corrugated cardboard as a
| child. Uphill and against the wind in both directions.
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