Solderless breadboards are a fantastic tool for stirring the creative juices. In a few seconds, you can go from idea to prototype without ever touching the soldering iron. Unfortunately, the downside to this is that projects tend to expand to occupy all the available space on the breadboard, and the bench surrounding the project universally ends up cluttered with power supplies, meters, jumpers, and parts you’ve swapped in and out of the circuit.
In an attempt to tame this runaway mess, [Raph] came up with this neat modular breadboard system. It hearkens back to the all-in-one prototyping systems we greatly coveted when the whole concept of solderless breadboards was new and correspondingly unaffordable. Even today, combination breadboard and power supply systems command a pretty penny, so rolling your own might make good financial sense. [Raph] made his system modular, with 3D-printed frames that lock together using clever dovetail slots. The prototyping area snaps to an instrumentation panel, which includes two different power supplies and a digital volt-amp meter. This helps keep the bench clean since you don’t need to string leads all over the place. The separate bin for organizing jumpers and tidbits that snaps into the frame is a nice touch, too.
Want to roll your own? Not a problem, as [Raph] has thoughtfully made all the build files available. What’s more, they’re parametric so you can customize them to the breadboards you already have. The only suggestion we have would be that making this compatible with [Zack Freedman]’s Gridfinity system might be kind of cool, too.
Jim Williams did not achieve greatness by being clean, organized and surrounded by pieces of chinese plastic shіt.
Designing, creating and building require neuronic activity. Non-productive comments, not so much.
Great comment. I am sure that Jim would approve !
/s
It’s not really electronic work bench until you spent 5 minutes looking for that strip of 10k resists you had in your hand a few minutes ago, and you finally find them already on the breadboard, along with the 22uF 50v caps you don’t remember ordering before.
(Chuckle!)
So true!
Interesting solution and the power supply and related put into a single module is a nice toush
I’m still waiting for a bread board to plug in all the SMT components that I use.
Pretty sweet board he made, looks like it’s lots of fun to play with
Solderless breadboards are a pain: you spend more time debugging the breadboard than debugging your circuit. I refuse to help anyone with their circuit on one.
Example, inspired by Horowitz and Hill in TAoE3 X-chapters: https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2024/03/16/practical-traps-with-a-one-transistor-audio-amplifier-solderless-breadboards-and-oscilloscopes/ Article notes how problem can be missed, what’s necessary to spot the problem, the cause and the cure.
Fortunately there are much better (easy, cheap, fast, reliable) alternatives to solderless breadboards. https://entertaininghacks.wordpress.com/2020/07/22/prototyping-circuits-easy-cheap-fast-reliable-techniques/
+1 …. they’re ok for illuminating a couple of LEDs, but cause more problems than solutions for anything remotely complicated.
meh…the practical advice there is valuable. i especially appreciate the reminder (which i only properly internalized a few years ago) that the edge transition rate is what’s important, not the frequency. but it doesn’t mean breadboards or bad or that rats nest is a suitable alternative.
personally, i use a breadboard for prototyping and some sort of perfboard for final assembly. my hands shake so soldering is a challenge for me…i can generally overcome it on a perfboard but i really struggle with dead bug / rats nest. yeah there are techniques but it’s hard. i’m not producing a commercial product and i have not yet had a custom pcb made for me. the breadboard gives me the advantage of not soldering, and none of these alternatives give that advantage.
the advantages and disadvantages of the different techniques depend on what you’re trying to accomplish and what resources you bring. it’s not as simple as you make it out to be. you might as well say that the spring terminals mounted on cardboard substrate in 100-in-one kits are bad. yeah, they have downsides, but they are how most of us got started
Ugly style over copper clad FTW
Like every tool in existence, a breadboard has its uses & gotchas.
Wouldn’t be surprised if 100s of thousands of people / students using Arduino cut their teeth with Arduino thanks to solderless breadboards. Witness all the instructables, projects and Make-like magazines out there doing so. To great effect and without surprises.
But yeah, I get it, you seem to have a beef w them. Thank heavens for your “refusal to help anyone w their circuit on one”. Sounds like you’d be discouraging beginners more than inspiring them…
Tidiness is for the weak ones…
As my old manager once said “A tidy desk is indicative of too liitle to do”. Kindly saved me a grilling from the big boss.
If your boss yells at you for having a clean workspace he must he the biggest moron in the world
I strongly disagree, when things are messy it becomes distracting and confusing for me, I end up spending too much time trying to think through what I’m looking at and remember what things do, spend some time organizing and you can reason about things better. Cough cough read SICP
Good idea. I’d gridfinity it so that the bits can be stored nicely when not in use and add some other modules. eg. Ben eaters clock circuit, bounceless switches and leds, some relay drivers etc.