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.
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.
sounds like a project for you to invent my man. don’t wait for someone else to do your dream!
Designing, creating and building require neuronic activity. Non-productive comments, not so much.
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
Too many people persist in the “scope needs to have 5* the frequency of your signal” myth, even when they are shown the theoretical and practical reasons that is false.
I too started with the spring terminals on hardboard substrates, the Philips EE20 in my case. I still have some of the bits :) They had AC126 transistors with an fT of 1MHz. Even yesterday’s jellybean transistors (2N3904) were/are 30* faster, i.e. 300MHz.
As with everything, it is necessary to understand what a given technique/technology/person can do and can’t do. Then you pick the appropriate combination for the job at hand.
Sorry to hear about your handshake. Shame physics doesn’t make any concessions to that!
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…
That post explicitly mentions a wider variety of different techniques, mentions some positives and negatives, states that techniques can me mixed and matched as appropriate, and shows examples.
Beginners? I have created and guided “skillshares” in soldering. In a couple of hours beginners who had never done soldering before were creating 555-based astables using manhattan techniques. Ask them whether they were inspired :)
Screwdrivers are a pain. They’re harder to hold than a hammer, and the plastic handles like to chip and break when you’re driving nails with them.
There are WORLDS of projects perfectly suited for solderless breadboards. There are also projects completely unsuited for them. Dismissing them in general, though, seems unduly limiting.
I built a video display subsystem on eight or ten breadboards bolted to a baking sheet (ground plane!). This was circa 1983 for a TRS-80 Mod I, though, so a ~2MHz bus talking to forty-odd LSTTL chips, with some higher-speed stuff at the video end. It worked. I wouldn’t try it for PCIe. ;-)
If I had read the Horowitz and Hill article in my youth, I probably never would have bothered to use the white boards to successfully prototype circuits over the last 50 years. I still have many of them setup. The most common problem I had was leads touching other leads. We used a similar modular pegboard system at DeVry in the early ’70s but when the white boards became available they were a vast improvement.
Tell that to Ben Eater!
Had to look him up.
Wow, great examples of breadboard use for computing projects.
Thanks for the reference !
Whole 8bit cpus wired up on breadboards… mind blown: https://eater.net/8bit
And his comment section is full of people who were so inspired they upped him, with gigantic multi-breadboard cpu contraptions.
Meanwhile, a few comments above in this comment section here…
Such efforts might appear to work but still have intermittent or pattern-sensitive errors. And then someone sneezes, or slams a door, or bumps the table.
Building a complete computer on a solderless breadboard is heroic. Unnecessarily heroic.
Analogy: crossing the Alps/Rockies/Andes/Himalayas on a push bike is similarly heroic. Arguably fun to do and to test yourself, but not something to recommend to another person.
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
Great comment. I am sure that Jim would approve !
/s
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.
Ha, your comment reminded me of an electronic kit I had as a kid in the 80s. Was called an “Electronic erector kit” (Gakken EX kit).
Consisted in cubes, each containing 1 component (transistor, sensor, resistor, etc), with electrical contacts on their sides. A case providing power & various accessories (speaker, antenna…) had a grid area in which the cubes could be plopped down, thereby creating connections and becoming functional. Could amplify sounds, listen to radio, etc.
One could argue that some std electronic devices nowadays (like the Arduino ecosystem) could lend themselves well to this kind of lego-istic approach. Maybe I’ll modify my dovetail / bump system described in the article to do just that one day…
Fun stuff !!!