5 ms·
Once you figure out simulation and EDA tools, breadboards are pretty much pointless. If the circuit is simple enough to breadboard within half a day, it's also
by leoedin 6y ago
Once you figure out simulation and EDA tools, breadboards are pretty much pointless. If the circuit is simple enough to breadboard within half a day, it's also simple enough to simulate effectively. If it's complex (normally due to high speed effects, parasitics and other things that are terrible on a breadboard) then the time spent getting it working in a breadboard is essentially wasted. You never know if it's the design or breadboarding at fault.
Soldered breadboarding (eg veroboard) has its place - at least then you can be certain there's not any electrical connection issues. But PCBs are so cheap and quick even that seems fairly pointless. It's very labour intensive for complex designs which would take less than a day to design and layout in EDA.
- truckerbill 6y agoDo you have any software recommendations for prototyping digital circuits with dynamic input? Things like buttons and midi. The trial and error process of breadboarding is nice for a tinkerer but I’d like to do it all in software.
- leoedin 6y agoIt depends what you're doing - for analogue circuits the free software LTSpice is pretty great. It's clunky and you need to follow some tutorials, but it's a brilliant way to sanity check an analogue design before you build it. You can set square wave voltages to see dynamic performance. If you want to simulate logic then logisim is really useful - you can design your circuit in terms of logic gates and then change inputs to see how it behaves - or generate a truth table. Good for checking that your logic works as expected.