5 ms·

I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have any pointers for how to gain the kn

I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have any pointers for how to gain the knowledge to get past this? Right now I feel like I dont even know what I dont know.

petsfed 3y ago
A lot of it comes down to being mindful of what you're spending the most time on during assembly, but some of it is just hard-won. But I've learned a lot from reading Hackaday. Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard way (but most people do): Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household environment. Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be structural. Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity, and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that degradation. Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB, because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally everything. Make sure you include mechanical support points for your designs, and pick the right size and material for your mechanical supports. All of this to say, your hardware thing is a thing first, and an expression of your software/firmware design second. If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing, the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.
- andyjohnson0 3y ago
  Thank you.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Please improve this (I have only dabbled), but I’ll add a couple points as well: - Don’t run data lines and power lines right next to each other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself) - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) - Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)
  - petsfed 3y ago
    > - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) If your design suffers from the consequences of this, your reach has probably exceeded your grasp. Its true that you can get noise from sharp corners, but unless you're running SPI at maximum speed, it probably won't cause any bugs in your project. And if you need to run that fast, you're going to run into other, less straightforward signal integrity problems too. PCBs with right angle trances look ugly though. So I might still judge you for it, but only if you also wear white before Memorial Day.
    - jacquesm 3y ago
      And right angle traces are more prone to delamination, which is the major reason why you want to bevel your corners.
      - prabhu-yu 3y ago
        Etching would be difficult. ie, if you bend two traces side by side with 90 degree corner, watch the etching around the corner. ie copper may be left on the inner angle of the 90-degree turn. So, I do not use 90 degree turns for this reason, if not for the EMI reason.
        jacquesm 3y ago
        Yes, the EMI thing is real but not at typical hobbyist frequency ranges. But the mechanical aspects are far, far more important and right angles are simply a bad idea. Ideally the lines are smoothly flowing (like say at the bottom of the old KIM boards), but that's not how auto routers place the traces. 45 degree angles in succession are a good enough compromise. They're mechanically reasonably strong, they don't delaminate and can be easily placed and used for bus patterns with closely spaced traces that will reliably etch without the outside being eaten up and the inside being 'too late'.
        3y ago
analog31 3y ago
Take things apart. Fix things, while observing how they break. There are amazing online videos on how to repair virtually anything that goes wrong with a home appliance. Make things that improve your life at home. These are things that a lot of hardware people did as kids, including myself. Get your hands involved. Look inside older stuff that predates 3d printing and cheap mold tooling, just to avoid the trap of everything being made the same way. In my case, since I'm interested in music, I've looked inside things like guitar pedals and amps, which often solve the problem of making something that's robust, but that can be made profitably in short runs and small shops. Get a hold of the McMaster-Carr catalog, in paper form, and leave it in the bathroom. An old Digi-Key catalog if someone still has one.
tuatoru 3y ago
The Cave Pearl Project (arduino based underwater data loggers, used for real science in cave systems) has a blog and several Youtube videos with info about ruggedizing electronics for humid environments and temperatures from freezing to about 60 Celsius. [1] Two words: conformal coating. Lots of other good in-the-trenches reporting of hard-won knowledge in the blog. Many epoxy resins shrink significantly, for example. That may or may not be important for your project. The blog is not super condensed but it's worth reading, especially for seeing the evolution of design and construction practise from the early years (2011) to now. There's a book, now somewhat dated, on the Protection of Electronic Circuits from Overvoltages (lightning strikes, or fridge motors, for example): [2] TVSes (transient voltage suppressors) are still in use, however. Even varistors. Connectors are the bane of every electrical engineer's life. There are more designs of connectors than of any other category of component, and probably there are good reasons for all of them to exist. I haven't got any good references for this topic though. Other things like fuses, fireproof insulation on on your power cables, physical design such that prying objects can't touch high voltages, and so are about protecting the rest of the world from your projects. Rod Elliott's web site [3] is a mine of information for beginning to intermediate hobbyists. It's focused on analog, audio specifically, but when you get down deep enough, everything in electronics is analog. you need to know about resistance, capacitance, and inductance, earthing (grounding) layout, and other similar topics. 1. https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-your-electronics-project/ https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-you... 2. https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html Available on Amazon as an ebook. 3. https://www.sound-au.com/articles/index.htm https://www.sound-au.com/articles/index.htm

petsfed 3y ago

A lot of it comes down to being mindful of what you're spending the most time on during assembly, but some of it is just hard-won. But I've learned a lot from reading Hackaday. Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard way (but most people do): Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household environment. Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be structural. Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity, and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that degradation. Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB, because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally everything. Make sure you include mechanical support points for your designs, and pick the right size and material for your mechanical supports. All of this to say, your hardware thing is a thing first, and an expression of your software/firmware design second. If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing, the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.

andyjohnson0 3y ago
Thank you.
joshspankit 3y ago
Please improve this (I have only dabbled), but I’ll add a couple points as well: - Don’t run data lines and power lines right next to each other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself) - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) - Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)
- petsfed 3y ago
  > - PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean) If your design suffers from the consequences of this, your reach has probably exceeded your grasp. Its true that you can get noise from sharp corners, but unless you're running SPI at maximum speed, it probably won't cause any bugs in your project. And if you need to run that fast, you're going to run into other, less straightforward signal integrity problems too. PCBs with right angle trances look ugly though. So I might still judge you for it, but only if you also wear white before Memorial Day.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    And right angle traces are more prone to delamination, which is the major reason why you want to bevel your corners.
    - prabhu-yu 3y ago
      Etching would be difficult. ie, if you bend two traces side by side with 90 degree corner, watch the etching around the corner. ie copper may be left on the inner angle of the 90-degree turn. So, I do not use 90 degree turns for this reason, if not for the EMI reason.
      - jacquesm 3y ago
        Yes, the EMI thing is real but not at typical hobbyist frequency ranges. But the mechanical aspects are far, far more important and right angles are simply a bad idea. Ideally the lines are smoothly flowing (like say at the bottom of the old KIM boards), but that's not how auto routers place the traces. 45 degree angles in succession are a good enough compromise. They're mechanically reasonably strong, they don't delaminate and can be easily placed and used for bus patterns with closely spaced traces that will reliably etch without the outside being eaten up and the inside being 'too late'.
        3y ago

analog31 3y ago

Take things apart. Fix things, while observing how they break. There are amazing online videos on how to repair virtually anything that goes wrong with a home appliance. Make things that improve your life at home. These are things that a lot of hardware people did as kids, including myself. Get your hands involved. Look inside older stuff that predates 3d printing and cheap mold tooling, just to avoid the trap of everything being made the same way. In my case, since I'm interested in music, I've looked inside things like guitar pedals and amps, which often solve the problem of making something that's robust, but that can be made profitably in short runs and small shops. Get a hold of the McMaster-Carr catalog, in paper form, and leave it in the bathroom. An old Digi-Key catalog if someone still has one.

tuatoru 3y ago

The Cave Pearl Project (arduino based underwater data loggers, used for real science in cave systems) has a blog and several Youtube videos with info about ruggedizing electronics for humid environments and temperatures from freezing to about 60 Celsius. [1] Two words: conformal coating. Lots of other good in-the-trenches reporting of hard-won knowledge in the blog. Many epoxy resins shrink significantly, for example. That may or may not be important for your project. The blog is not super condensed but it's worth reading, especially for seeing the evolution of design and construction practise from the early years (2011) to now. There's a book, now somewhat dated, on the Protection of Electronic Circuits from Overvoltages (lightning strikes, or fridge motors, for example): [2] TVSes (transient voltage suppressors) are still in use, however. Even varistors. Connectors are the bane of every electrical engineer's life. There are more designs of connectors than of any other category of component, and probably there are good reasons for all of them to exist. I haven't got any good references for this topic though. Other things like fuses, fireproof insulation on on your power cables, physical design such that prying objects can't touch high voltages, and so are about protecting the rest of the world from your projects. Rod Elliott's web site [3] is a mine of information for beginning to intermediate hobbyists. It's focused on analog, audio specifically, but when you get down deep enough, everything in electronics is analog. you need to know about resistance, capacitance, and inductance, earthing (grounding) layout, and other similar topics. 1. https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-your-electronics-project/ https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-you... 2. https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html Available on Amazon as an ebook. 3. https://www.sound-au.com/articles/index.htm https://www.sound-au.com/articles/index.htm