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)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I chose a software analogy and digital example because this is a software forum. Don't read too much into it.
In a different analogy, you could say that capacitance gives inertia to voltage and inductance gives inertia to current. The power loop acts as an inductor and antenna. It's susceptible to disturbances from the chip, the power supply, and interference. Analog chips are particularly susceptible to such disturbances.
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.
Whenever your chip draws current from the power-rails in short bursts you esentially momentarily pull down the voltage of the power rail, and it can do that because the power supply has a non-zero internal resistance and thus forms a voltage divider with everything that is connected to it. This dip in voltage can affect neighbouring chips.
The solution is to install a small bucket/reservoir (a capacitor) which is filled with enough charge to serve that burst and smooth it's effect on the power rails (and thus decoupling it from the neighbouring components). The size of that capacitor depends on the load, but for most ICs it is enough to put one 100nF capacitor per power rail, but check the datasheet for more info.
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.
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.
- 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)