Look through the last two decades of electronics project built on perfboard, and you’ll notice a trend. Perfboard is designed for through-hole parts, but ever more frequently, the parts we need are only available as surface mount devices. What does this mean for the future of all those protoboard, veroboard, and tagboard designs? It’s not good, but fortunately, there may be an answer. It’s perfboard designed for mounting SOICs, SOTs, and other surface mount devices.
Perfboard is an extremely simple concept. Most through-hole electronic components are built around 0.1″ or 2.54 mm spacing between pins. Yes, there are exceptions, but you can always bend the middle pin of a transistor and put it in a hole. SMT devices are different. You can’t really bend the pins, and the pin pitch is too small for the 0.1″ holes in traditional perfboard.
[electronic_eel] is changing that game up with his own design for perfboard. This perfboard has the traditional 0.1″ holes, but there are SMD pads sprinkled about between these holes. The result is being able to solder SOIC, SOT23-6, SOT23 and SOT363 devices directly to a board alongside 0603 and 0805 devices. Connect everything with a few beads of solder and you have a functional circuit made out of surface mount devices on something that’s still compatible with the old protoboard designs.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a new type of protoboard make it into production. A few years ago, Perf+, a bizarre ‘bus-based’ protoboard solution came onto the scene, although that wasn’t really designed for SMD parts. While [electronic_eel] doesn’t have any plans to sell his protoboard, the files are available, and you can easily design your own small piece of perfboard.
I remember seeing something similar as a actual product From Asia with “flower” shaped pads.
Back in 2012 or so
Funny, I saw that just a few weeks ago:
https://www.elecfreaks.com/2362.html
nice, I’d like to get my hands on a board or two.
But, because I’m not in a position to influence my company, I don’t feel right asking for a “free” sample.
Schmartboard has some also, but I really like the flower board. The fact taht someone decided to roll their own is very cool too.
This is some real clever design!
Schmartboards have been around for a awhile: http://schmartboard.com/
Stupid autocorrect… Annoying inability to edit posts…
1++
Stop trying to increment a constant. You’re upsetting the universe.
I was having trouble typing because all of my keys were off by 1. Tff xibu nfbo?
But 1 is the reference of unity so 1 is still 1 after it’s incremented. It’s just that all the other numbers are 1 less.
I have a fix. 1–
Now the universe is in harmony.
It’s a nice design, and for 2$ shipped for 10 from JLCPCB it’s nuts, cheaper than the traditional types on aliexpress even. I got some just for fun.
Some guy developed this protoboard but no commercial success http://tinyimg.io/i/LCO35pk.jpg No source files too but relatively easy to reconstruct.
Also this one looks good http://www.busboard.com/images/products/BPS-SMT3UT_Top.jpg
Hmm, seems like these designs are missing the 2.54mm grid for THT. So you can’t easily whack in a breakout board for some more complex circuitry, like a blue pill board or similar.
I like the idea, but why keep the holes? I see some used for header pins, but those come in SMT versions, too. If you skipped the holes, you could keep the back side a solid ground plane, which could benefit a lot of designs.
I guess it could no longer be called perfboard, though.
How do you connect to the ground plane if you have no holes or vias? Without a low impedance connection to it, it won’t do you any good.
Good point. Holes, then, but not plated-through.
Interesting development. although making tracks was never a problem after started using 0.4mm tinned wire. but having pads between the 0.1″ holes is a nice feature.
This product looks pretty useful.
In a pinch you can carefully divide the regular proto board 0.1″ pads in half with an Xacto knife to solder on an SOIC or other 0.05″ pitch package. If you are careful, it works extremely well for a quick hack.
it seems every time i see a cool new layout for perf board i end up using tried and true stripboard because its cheaper.
Look interesting but last time I got excited about a new fancy pant perf board, I ended up wasting my money. I had gotten a few flower boards pcb from Elecfreaks a few years back and I am not sure if I got a bad batch or something but I was never able to properly solder on them and ended up shelving them. At least those one appear to be cheaper
We experimented with a Perf+ design for jig building – https://hackaday.io/project/22000-perf-shields
It is available on Tindie, but honestly they aren’t perfected. We will probably improve the next batch if there is interest. Mixing SOIC with through-hole is very interesting. It might make more sense though to have a through hole section and a small surface mount section that supports different pitches.
I’m not sure different sections on a protoboard will help. Because then you’ll need to run long wires or traces over your board to reach the other section if you want to combine, say, a THT breakout board with SOIC, or SOIC and TSSOP and so on. EMC susceptibility, ground bounce and so on are already often a problem with protoboard, no need to increase these problems with lot’s of long wires.
I think the small 1.27mm pitch smd adapters with castellated holes for TSSOP I added to my protoboards are a better way to solve this: You can solder them on where you need them to keep traces short. They are only half the size of traditional 2.54mm adapters, so they don’t add much wasted space.
I added just the TSSOP14, TSSOP16 and SC-70 because that is what I need most of the time myself. But the same concept would of course also work for other TSSOP pincounts, MSOP, VSSOP and so on. If someone wants to make these adapters, I’m happy to take patches.
Solder dragging is the ugliest of ugly. Use a piece of wire, faster, uses a LOT less solder, and is a hell of a lot more reliable.