6 ms·

How to use a Breadboard. How do breadboards work? (2021) [video]

peter_d_sherman 3y ago
Related: Steve Morrison's BBCircuits (Breadboard Circuits) channel on YouTube (which looks like a great channel for anyone interested in electronics!): https://www.youtube.com/@BBCircuitsbySteveMorrison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@BBCircuitsbySteveMorrison/videos
- nottorp 3y ago
  Sheesh. Any resources in old school text plus some piccies format?
  - kd5bjo 3y ago
    https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/ https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/ https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims/ https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims/ https://archive.org/details/555-designs https://archive.org/details/555-designs https://archive.org/details/engineersminin00mims https://archive.org/details/engineersminin00mims
    - nottorp 3y ago
      Sarcasm I see. The video referred by the original post is 5 minutes long so I could probably scan the equivalent text in 1 minute. More, I could use a text version as reference, which is a lot more difficult when scrolling about in a video.
      - kd5bjo 3y ago
        No sarcasm here; you asked for some text-based resources and so I listed some that I know to be quality-- Paper copies of these books and some parts/breadboards to tinker with are how I learned the basics of electronics a couple of decades ago. The fundamentals haven't changed.
    - peter_d_sherman 3y ago
      Some excellent links; thank you very much! (Yes, I remember Forrest Mims (as an author) from "the old Radio Shack days" (where his books were primarily found, back in the day...) He was a great author of electronics related texts. It's nice to see his works preserved online!)
everyone 3y ago
I super recommend to anyone, getting the Arduino starter kit, and going through the projects book. Most fun I'd had in ages + a great hands on way to begin to understand how electronics are not magic. https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-language https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-...
- brewtide 3y ago
  I just got my son the "30 days lost in space" inventr.io kit (not associated at all with them). It seems more pricey than your standard Arduino kit for sure, but provides a (pretty lame..) story of the why things are being built. Point being, as his first (and close to my first) experience with breadboards and programming, he is loving it and having the programming aspect and electronics aspect combined into "this code makes this thing do this" makes it FAR more interesting for him. I doubt it'll be his passion in life (but who knows) but it's certainly helping him pay attention to details and he is certainly learning a good bit about designing some simple circuits. Would recommend. (Unrelated, but he also got a build your own am/fm radio kit and he successfully soldered all the bits he needed to, having never soldered before and only ended up with one good burn on his hand at the last connection to be made, the negative battery!) Confidence building things, and a great way of teaching "you can relatively do anything, you just have to practice!". You could see the pride when he flicked the switch and noise was made. Same , slower, pride on every day he's "lost in space".
- Turing_Machine 3y ago
  Also Raspberry Pi (the Coke to Arduino's Pepsi). More expensive (especially since hoarders have been bulk ordering them and jacking up the price), but IMO more flexible and powerful. https://www.raspberrypi.com/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/ There are several others, but Arduino and Raspberry Pi seem to be the ones with the widest variety of "it just works" add-on components and programming tutorials.
Renaud 3y ago
For those wanting to tinker but laking access to the equipment, there are breadboard simulators. Surprisingly capable. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...
wilgertvelinga 3y ago
Even more in-depth from the magnificent Ben Eater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-_rJqvDhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-_rJqvDhQ
- theSuda 3y ago
  Also this one from years ago is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WReFkfrUIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WReFkfrUIk Learned a lot of basics with this one.
atoav 3y ago
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 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)
cmacleod4 3y ago
Make sure your knife is sharp. Let freshly-baked bread cool before attempting to slice. Wash the board after use. Simple!??
- cmacleod4 3y ago
  Some people have no sense of humour :-/
baz00 3y ago
30 years experience says the best way to use a breadboard is don't use one. They suffer from contact wear, stray capacitance and inductance, unreliable contacts and rather non optimal signal routing. This slowly adds up to pending headaches like failing circuits and ones that can't be reproduced. Even the nice 3M ones are problematic. Refer to https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/application-notes/an47fa.pdf https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appl... ... AN47-26 breadboarding techniques. I tend to use single sided copper clad board and build stuff rats nest. Drill some holes through the board and screw it to the inside of a die cast box lid and for a one off it's good. Works fine up to 1GHz or so with some thinking unlike breadboards (1MHz if the planets are aligned appropriately). Also works for high voltage and high current stuff. If you have lots of digital, flip the ICs upside down and use kynar for signal routing. Here's one I did last year where someone stole the internal oscillator out of an RF signal generator so I built one from the service manual schematics. Prototype: https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs ... This was "productionised" onto a custom PCB: https://imgur.com/WM44RYl https://imgur.com/WM44RYl
- jcarrano 3y ago
  I came here to say the same. I was bitten by faulty breadboards, now no more. Perfboard is not much more work to assemble and way more reliable.
- kd5bjo 3y ago
  There are plenty of projects for which solderless breadboards are unsuitable, but there are also lots for which they're perfectly fine. Lots of hobbyists and most professionals will outgrow solderless breadboards sooner or later, but they're still a good place to get started.
  - baz00 3y ago
    Spend an hour in an undergrad EE lab helping people with fucked up breadboards and you change your mind rapidly. Same goes for hobbyists but they don’t have someone to help them available. I’ve seen people chewed up for hours debugging a circuit and find it’s a breadboard problem.
beaker52 3y ago
I would have found it much more intuitive to understand had the breadboard been in the vertical orientation.
gumby 3y ago
I’m so old that when I made circuits as a kid in the 1970s I literally mounted them on a wooden board like we used to cut bread on upstairs in the kitchen.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I remember mounting my circuits on corrugated cardboard as a child. Uphill and against the wind in both directions.
  - gumby 3y ago
    They are called "breadboards" for a reason. I have been known to use a piece of cardboard for a few small dead-bug circuits from time to time. Google used cardboard rather than cases to separate their early servers (IIRC the cardboard was on a shelf and the board on top, actually).
    - JohnFen 3y ago
      > They are called "breadboards" for a reason. I literally never made this connection until you pointed it out. Thank you for an "aha" moment!
mikewarot 3y ago
If you can get some old 25 pair phone cable out of a building, it makes perfect hookup wire for use in the breadboards, and many other things. However... solid wire tends to get brittle and break after repeated flexing, never use it for permanent connections that undergo any movement.

Related: Steve Morrison's BBCircuits (Breadboard Circuits) channel on YouTube (which looks like a great channel for anyone interested in electronics!): https://www.youtube.com/@BBCircuitsbySteveMorrison/videos https://www.youtube.com/@BBCircuitsbySteveMorrison/videos

nottorp 3y ago
Sheesh. Any resources in old school text plus some piccies format?
- kd5bjo 3y ago
  https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/ https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/ https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims/ https://archive.org/details/engineersmininot00mims/ https://archive.org/details/555-designs https://archive.org/details/555-designs https://archive.org/details/engineersminin00mims https://archive.org/details/engineersminin00mims
  - nottorp 3y ago
    Sarcasm I see. The video referred by the original post is 5 minutes long so I could probably scan the equivalent text in 1 minute. More, I could use a text version as reference, which is a lot more difficult when scrolling about in a video.
    - kd5bjo 3y ago
      No sarcasm here; you asked for some text-based resources and so I listed some that I know to be quality-- Paper copies of these books and some parts/breadboards to tinker with are how I learned the basics of electronics a couple of decades ago. The fundamentals haven't changed.
  - peter_d_sherman 3y ago
    Some excellent links; thank you very much! (Yes, I remember Forrest Mims (as an author) from "the old Radio Shack days" (where his books were primarily found, back in the day...) He was a great author of electronics related texts. It's nice to see his works preserved online!)

everyone 3y ago

I super recommend to anyone, getting the Arduino starter kit, and going through the projects book. Most fun I'd had in ages + a great hands on way to begin to understand how electronics are not magic. https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-language https://store.arduino.cc/products/arduino-starter-kit-multi-...

brewtide 3y ago
I just got my son the "30 days lost in space" inventr.io kit (not associated at all with them). It seems more pricey than your standard Arduino kit for sure, but provides a (pretty lame..) story of the why things are being built. Point being, as his first (and close to my first) experience with breadboards and programming, he is loving it and having the programming aspect and electronics aspect combined into "this code makes this thing do this" makes it FAR more interesting for him. I doubt it'll be his passion in life (but who knows) but it's certainly helping him pay attention to details and he is certainly learning a good bit about designing some simple circuits. Would recommend. (Unrelated, but he also got a build your own am/fm radio kit and he successfully soldered all the bits he needed to, having never soldered before and only ended up with one good burn on his hand at the last connection to be made, the negative battery!) Confidence building things, and a great way of teaching "you can relatively do anything, you just have to practice!". You could see the pride when he flicked the switch and noise was made. Same , slower, pride on every day he's "lost in space".
Turing_Machine 3y ago
Also Raspberry Pi (the Coke to Arduino's Pepsi). More expensive (especially since hoarders have been bulk ordering them and jacking up the price), but IMO more flexible and powerful. https://www.raspberrypi.com/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/ There are several others, but Arduino and Raspberry Pi seem to be the ones with the widest variety of "it just works" add-on components and programming tutorials.

Renaud 3y ago

For those wanting to tinker but laking access to the equipment, there are breadboard simulators. Surprisingly capable. https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Simulator/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2198800/CRUMB_Circuit_Sim...

wilgertvelinga 3y ago

Even more in-depth from the magnificent Ben Eater: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-_rJqvDhQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE-_rJqvDhQ

theSuda 3y ago
Also this one from years ago is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WReFkfrUIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WReFkfrUIk Learned a lot of basics with this one.

atoav 3y ago

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 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)

cmacleod4 3y ago

Make sure your knife is sharp. Let freshly-baked bread cool before attempting to slice. Wash the board after use. Simple!??

cmacleod4 3y ago
Some people have no sense of humour :-/

baz00 3y ago

30 years experience says the best way to use a breadboard is don't use one. They suffer from contact wear, stray capacitance and inductance, unreliable contacts and rather non optimal signal routing. This slowly adds up to pending headaches like failing circuits and ones that can't be reproduced. Even the nice 3M ones are problematic. Refer to https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/application-notes/an47fa.pdf https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/appl... ... AN47-26 breadboarding techniques. I tend to use single sided copper clad board and build stuff rats nest. Drill some holes through the board and screw it to the inside of a die cast box lid and for a one off it's good. Works fine up to 1GHz or so with some thinking unlike breadboards (1MHz if the planets are aligned appropriately). Also works for high voltage and high current stuff. If you have lots of digital, flip the ICs upside down and use kynar for signal routing. Here's one I did last year where someone stole the internal oscillator out of an RF signal generator so I built one from the service manual schematics. Prototype: https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs https://imgur.com/KLnEzcs ... This was "productionised" onto a custom PCB: https://imgur.com/WM44RYl https://imgur.com/WM44RYl

jcarrano 3y ago
I came here to say the same. I was bitten by faulty breadboards, now no more. Perfboard is not much more work to assemble and way more reliable.
kd5bjo 3y ago
There are plenty of projects for which solderless breadboards are unsuitable, but there are also lots for which they're perfectly fine. Lots of hobbyists and most professionals will outgrow solderless breadboards sooner or later, but they're still a good place to get started.
- baz00 3y ago
  Spend an hour in an undergrad EE lab helping people with fucked up breadboards and you change your mind rapidly. Same goes for hobbyists but they don’t have someone to help them available. I’ve seen people chewed up for hours debugging a circuit and find it’s a breadboard problem.

beaker52 3y ago

I would have found it much more intuitive to understand had the breadboard been in the vertical orientation.

gumby 3y ago

I’m so old that when I made circuits as a kid in the 1970s I literally mounted them on a wooden board like we used to cut bread on upstairs in the kitchen.

JohnFen 3y ago
I remember mounting my circuits on corrugated cardboard as a child. Uphill and against the wind in both directions.
- gumby 3y ago
  They are called "breadboards" for a reason. I have been known to use a piece of cardboard for a few small dead-bug circuits from time to time. Google used cardboard rather than cases to separate their early servers (IIRC the cardboard was on a shelf and the board on top, actually).
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > They are called "breadboards" for a reason. I literally never made this connection until you pointed it out. Thank you for an "aha" moment!

mikewarot 3y ago

If you can get some old 25 pair phone cable out of a building, it makes perfect hookup wire for use in the breadboards, and many other things. However... solid wire tends to get brittle and break after repeated flexing, never use it for permanent connections that undergo any movement.