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I tried to play with "manual" wire wrap tool. It's easy to buy thin wires for wrapping but it was extremely difficult to buy wire-wrap ready IC sockets. The dif

I tried to play with "manual" wire wrap tool. It's easy to buy thin wires for wrapping but it was extremely difficult to buy wire-wrap ready IC sockets. The difference is in the shape of the socket pins, the wire-wrap requires long rectangular pins but such sockets are extremely rare and expensive. So my adventure with wrapping ended rather quickly.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
I had a box-full until recently that I shamefully threw out :) Yeah, the pins were also quite strong (harder to snip with side cutters iirc), and square (or hex) because the wire needs to bite into the edge of the pin. You could get away with as little as three turns. They were long because you might typically make 3 or 4 connections per pin, so the height would soon stack up. It is really hard, but slightly possible to wire-wrap directly to the pins of old through-hole TTL logic if you have only one connection per pin. The main problem is that unless you use very fine wire and go gently the torsion will twist the IC pins off. It's also possible to use a mixed method of wrap and solder to make point-to-point simple digital circuits.
bluenose69 4y ago
It's too bad you missed out on the experience. It was a lot of fun, a sort of mixture of knitting and following a detailed map. I was doing it with circuit designs I had made myself, so I had the fun of that early stage of deciding what to hook up, where to place things on the board, and so forth. I laid it all out on paper, then made pin-connection tables (again, by hand) and checked everything over and over. Then it was on to the exciting stage of placing components on the board and wiring. To avoid confusion, it helped to lay the wires out very precisely, so all steps had to be done with care and frequent checking. Precision work like that is very absorbing. Time just goes by as you live in the moment -- a bit like getting lost in music or art. Beyond this relaxation-through-concentration element, the actual materials were beautiful. Gold posts, and silvery wires, each gleaming in the bright light I needed to see my work taking shape. The wrapping itself took a little bit of skill, and it was lovely to feel the coils going on, each precisely the same as another. Even stripping the insulation was fun, somehow. I had an electric wrapper, but I really preferred doing it by hand. More zen. All of this was in the 1970s, and was aimed at purpose-built scientific equipment in a university environment. All the materials are long-gone and I have no photographs of anything. Everything is lost to history, except for isolated memories of the great fun I had. And, bonus, it all worked in the end!
- yodsanklai 4y ago
  We used that technique in my university in the late 90s in the computer architecture class. I personally found it quite boring.
cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I had the same experience. The lack of socket availability made it mostly a non-go. Which is a shame because it would fill the gap between breadboarding and PCB for many DIY projects.
linker3000 4y ago
There's an alternative method using regular IC sockets and header pins - works well: https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board
electroly 4y ago
Get square male pin headers (cheap!) and solder bridge them to the pins of a regular socket in adjacent perfboard holes. I love wire wrapping for home projects but I've never in my life seen a proper wire-wrap IC socket. Square male pin headers are the right size for wire wrapping.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

I had a box-full until recently that I shamefully threw out :) Yeah, the pins were also quite strong (harder to snip with side cutters iirc), and square (or hex) because the wire needs to bite into the edge of the pin. You could get away with as little as three turns. They were long because you might typically make 3 or 4 connections per pin, so the height would soon stack up. It is really hard, but slightly possible to wire-wrap directly to the pins of old through-hole TTL logic if you have only one connection per pin. The main problem is that unless you use very fine wire and go gently the torsion will twist the IC pins off. It's also possible to use a mixed method of wrap and solder to make point-to-point simple digital circuits.

bluenose69 4y ago

It's too bad you missed out on the experience. It was a lot of fun, a sort of mixture of knitting and following a detailed map. I was doing it with circuit designs I had made myself, so I had the fun of that early stage of deciding what to hook up, where to place things on the board, and so forth. I laid it all out on paper, then made pin-connection tables (again, by hand) and checked everything over and over. Then it was on to the exciting stage of placing components on the board and wiring. To avoid confusion, it helped to lay the wires out very precisely, so all steps had to be done with care and frequent checking. Precision work like that is very absorbing. Time just goes by as you live in the moment -- a bit like getting lost in music or art. Beyond this relaxation-through-concentration element, the actual materials were beautiful. Gold posts, and silvery wires, each gleaming in the bright light I needed to see my work taking shape. The wrapping itself took a little bit of skill, and it was lovely to feel the coils going on, each precisely the same as another. Even stripping the insulation was fun, somehow. I had an electric wrapper, but I really preferred doing it by hand. More zen. All of this was in the 1970s, and was aimed at purpose-built scientific equipment in a university environment. All the materials are long-gone and I have no photographs of anything. Everything is lost to history, except for isolated memories of the great fun I had. And, bonus, it all worked in the end!

yodsanklai 4y ago
We used that technique in my university in the late 90s in the computer architecture class. I personally found it quite boring.

cmrdporcupine 4y ago

I had the same experience. The lack of socket availability made it mostly a non-go. Which is a shame because it would fill the gap between breadboarding and PCB for many DIY projects.

linker3000 4y ago

There's an alternative method using regular IC sockets and header pins - works well: https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board https://github.com/linker3000/Z80-Board

electroly 4y ago

Get square male pin headers (cheap!) and solder bridge them to the pins of a regular socket in adjacent perfboard holes. I love wire wrapping for home projects but I've never in my life seen a proper wire-wrap IC socket. Square male pin headers are the right size for wire wrapping.