I always make boards this way. I never came around to making or ordering printed PCBs, although this is tempting as point-to-point soldering — especially those digital circuits with hundreds of connections that can be a laborious process. At 50, my back and eyes don’t like it much.
Marek Karcz
Nice article. I have one other type of board to add. Adafruit sells a series of 0.062” thick PCB “Perma-Proto” boards that are pin-for-pin compatible with solderless breadboards, except they contain plated-through solderable holes instead of push-in sockets.
I find the 1/4-sized boards useful for small circuits that will be permanently added to a project, although they take up more room than a standard solder board like is shown in the article.
David Goodsell
I make a lot of circuits on perfboard. I arrange the components so things look nice and so wires won’t have to cross so much when I wire it up. I use super glue to hold sockets in place so they don’t fall out when I turn the board over.
I always put the wires on the back side of the board as opposed to the way the image shows with the wires on the top side. I use solid copper 24 gauge phone wire that comes in cables with 50 wires of different colors with stripes.
Mark Thomas
I love PCBs that are similar to breadboards to make it easier, and keep soldering and wiring to a minimum. I’ve used many of the proto PCBs available and decided to have my own made. It’s quite inexpensive to have them made at the newer PCB houses.
Scott Beasley
For production boards, I utilize surface-mount technologies, but do test circuits and one-ups on protoboards. I found that 1206- or 1210-sized SMT resistors and capacitors fit very nicely between 0.1” spaced pins on the copper side of the protoboards.
Use SMTs for pull-up/pull-down resistors, decoupling caps, and components connected between adjacent pins.
Doing this allows very clean and higher density protoboard layouts.
Matt Ablett
Re: “Build a Castle in the Clouds” by Victor Chaney. Great article and well written, documented. One minor concern that may not actually exist is with the shielding included.
The transmit frequency from the base to the cloud of 1 MHz (also known as 1,000 kHz) is in the AM broadcast band with the possiblity of interference. Probably should check with an AM radio to determine if emissions in that band exist and to what distance.
It would be unfortunate if this device should attract the attention of the FCC. Otherwise, great design and oustanding persistance to make 10 coils to determine what works.
G. Shaiffer
Thank you for your nice comments.
I did check it with an AM radio close to my device, and could detect no signal. I thought it might be a big problem if I created an interference device.
Vic Chaney
