Solderless bread boards ?

I do a lot of microcontroller circuit work with solder-less bread boards. For years I've used the older 'Archer' style boards from Radio Shack. They'd cost about $12 and every time I needed one, I'd buy two. I never use any 'kit' type boards with connectors, power jacks, or whatever. Just the plain solder-less bread board screwed down onto a piece of plywood.

My boards are now 10 to 30 years old and pretty worn. I'm looking to buy several more boards - but can't find one with much quality. I bought 4 different varieties off of Ebay (all Chinese) and several of them had high resistance readings from one end of the power buss to the other. It was broken into like 3 sections, and I'd jumper each with a clean piece of 22 gauge solid copper wire ... and I'd find the resistance from end to end would vary between a few ohms and about 9 ohms. Not sure if it was something about the type of metal they used - didn't work well with copper perhaps. They'd also have up to 5% or so of the holes bad ... you couldn't insert a wire or resistor - the metal inside was off center. I couldn't use those.

The best one I found doesn't seem to have the resistance problem - but it wont grip many of my IC sockets. Press them all the way in and you can still very easy remove the socket with very little force. They seem to work ok with longer pins ... but I find myself cutting up different types of connectors to create a little carrier board to then plug into the board - where as in the past I'd mount something to a IC socket and that'd work fine. Now I have to build something that has long pins in order to get it to grip.

This kind I'm using now looks like the kind Radio Shack sells now - only while Radio Shacks version costs $18.69, the one I got out of China costs $3.

I want to buy perhaps 2 dozen boards - but I I don't want to spend $220, and I don't want to buy boards that can't hold my parts.

Has anyone bought any decent solder-less bread boards recently - the plain bread boards w/o the extra junk ?

Hi,

Maybe after some year of "bread boarding" you go the next step and route your own PCB.
It is not that difficult as it seems.
In any case a new challenge. I'm sure it will bring you some new fun...But expect some trouble also.
In the end the fun will win.

Klaus

I've had mixed experience with the ones you describe. 'Long' boards, usually with a blue and red line printed along the length of the outermost row of pins are absolutely useless. The depth of the spring contacts only just grips the tips of most IC pins and the power rails are in sections with clips joining them together to keep continuity from end to end. The clips drop off and have poor contact resistance.

What do seem to be better are board which are only 30 pins long with the power rails in groups of 5 holes. They have proven to be very reliable and they have 'dovetail' edges so they can be interlocked in both directions. From my perspective, their drawback is having to link the power rails from one board to the next and the shorter length limits the longest IC (or adapter) to 60 pins. As I work mostly with IC having 64 or 84 pins it means I need special adapters to span more than one board.

I buy them here: https://www.bitsbox.co.uk/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=238_244 . They are the '8x60' type.

Brian.

Thanks, but that etching my own pcb does not work when the circuit changes every other day.

I built custom one-of-a-kind audio circuits for companies who did not care much about cost as long as it worked well. Did I tell you about the crazy spec's (high fidelity sound on a huge intercom system) for the government's new airport sound system where my idea with the company I worked for were the only bidder and we got the job?
I tried a solderless breadboard one time and its wires picked up all kinds of interference and caused oscillation. Its contacts were intermittent. Never again.
So I designed every circuit properly so they all worked perfectly the first time then built every prototype on stripboard. The prototype looked good and worked so well that it was the final product and was sold.

It was not difficult to design the stripboard parts layout and wiring to be compact and simple but today's software can do it. The strips of copper are half of a pcb and the parts are the other half. The strips were cut so were used as different wires all along their length.