4 ms·
Soldering Prototypes with Enamel Magnet Wire (2020)
- rasz 8mo agoI have a good example - Piotr Grzesik's prototype of 486 SBC recently covered on Hackaday https://hackaday.com/2026/01/08/m8sbc-86-is-an-fpga-based-kinda-pc-compatible-486/ https://hackaday.com/2026/01/08/m8sbc-86-is-an-fpga-based-ki... and HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578601 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578601 https://imgur.com/gallery/486-homebrew-computer-lsUiWdw#dIBtgXv https://imgur.com/gallery/486-homebrew-computer-lsUiWdw#dIBt... Looks like something that shouldnt work at all :)
- jacquesm 8mo agoIndeed, by rights that shouldn't work. But it does and he threw in an ISA bus just for the heck of it and that works too. And all of this at a very respectable clock speed. Mad props.
- varjag 8mo agoI mean Cray-1 backplane was wire-wrapped, it definitely should have worked for 486.
- jacquesm 8mo agoSure, it's easy ;) Try it. Anything with latches above 10 MHz is pretty hard to get to run stable when using wirewrap. The Cray-1 was at its time absolute state-of-the-art. Replicating something like a 486 motherboard, which already had a whole raft of timing tricks to make sure that it all stayed synchronized is really not that easy. I've spent more than one evening baffled by stuff that should have been trivial at clock speeds a lot lower than that. A 33 MHz clock has a cycle time of 1/33000000 = 33 nano seconds. But the rise time of that clock is much, much shorter, on the order of a few ns. At that sort of slew rate anything becomes an antenna. The backplane of the Cray-1 was set up as transmission lines with two spiral wound wires for each signal, cut exactly to size to make sure the signal arrived at the right moment, and without the bulk of the signal leaking away. On this circuit board things are - let's put it friendly - a bit less organized than that. So by rights this really shouldn't have worked, the fact that it does absolutely amazes and inspires me.
- ranger_danger 8mo agoWhen we had to bypass the onboard UARTs: https://0x0.st/PbKT.jpg https://0x0.st/PbKT.jpg
- tylerflick 8mo agoIs this really easier to work with than bodge wire (wire wrap)? Asking because I still have a few rolls and would rather not waste money.
- russdill 8mo agoI have 31 AWG wire. I wouldn't use anything else for PCB rework. Bends so easily, no stripping necessary, and the roll will never run out.
- omgtehlion 8mo agoThis pic is quite unsettling, I didn't understand why at first, but this blue wire pinched under the bolt...
- 4gotunameagain 8mo agoMechanical stress relief is my guess !
- simojo 8mo agoThis is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
- vhiremath4 8mo agoMight be a dumb question, but isn’t the risk of cold joints proportional to your skill in soldering in general? Important context: I am definitely a noob to soldering
- 4gotunameagain 8mo agoIt is, yes. After some practice, you will not get cold joints. Or when there is a danger of a cold joint due to massive heat sinking around, you will know and be extra careful
- Animats 8mo agoMost people today use Kynar hook-up wire for this sort of thing. Even WalMart stocks it.
- crb3 8mo agoGo carefully there. Kynar tends to wilt at soldering heat. Press insulated wires together when they're still hot and suddenly they can be kissing; a 1-diameter short is easy to overlook when you're inspecting your work. I find it worthwhile to use teflon-insulated wire here. When I'm building a prototype, the last thing I want to have to distrust is my construction.
- Animats 8mo agoTrue. Kynar is good for toughness around square-cornered wire wrapping posts. Teflon will survive a touch of a soldering iron. I found my wire-wrapping gun recently. If I put in new C batteries it might work.
- aurizon 8mo agoI used to work for Schenectady Chemicals in 1968 we developed solderable self fluxing polyurethane coated enamelled wire, it was an immediate hit and soldered well. Times have changed and I left them in 1978, but it might be an item to look for as I found it very handy.
- burnt-resistor 8mo agoPossibly vaguely similar product from a German manufacturer: https://www.sh-wire.de/en/applications/product-range/shsoldr-v155/ https://www.sh-wire.de/en/applications/product-range/shsoldr...
- aurizon 8mo agoYes, urethane decomposes liberating longer chain organic acids which fluxes
- omgtehlion 8mo agoI'd recommend a spoon-style tip* instead of using a fresh drop of solder each time. [*] like these https://www.jbctools.com/cartridges-category-4-design-Spoon-menu-4.html https://www.jbctools.com/cartridges-category-4-design-Spoon-...
- taneq 8mo agoLooks kind of like a fountain pen for solder!
- omgtehlion 8mo agoAnd works like one ;)
- peteforde 8mo agoI truly do not understand the appeal of proto board. Certainly tastes are individual and like any skill worth practicing, you do get better at it... but it's just such a miserable way to work. IMO, again. Not only can you now order a real PCB for under $10, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could just buy extremely large pre-cut wire kits and treat them as the consumables that they truly are. I'd rather go back to wire-wrapping. Every time I think "this is a great opportunity to use up a proto board!" I end up covered in flux goo and wondering what on earth I was thinking. The real problem with proto board is what happens when you inevitably need to change your circuit. Again, it's miserable and suddenly your perceived speed gains are simply gone. I think that the most exciting thing in prototyping right now is Stephen Hawes experiments with a) creating a PCB with premade vias that can be used to prototype anything and b) using a fiber laser to make your own PCBs. Truly one of the most inspiring creators today.
- michaeljx 8mo agoAny recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?
- peteforde 8mo agoYes, actually! Depending on the complexity/situation/mood/need for permanence I use some combination of double-headed (male) jumper wire and pre-cut breadboard wires. I buy my jumper wire as tear-off ribbons because sometimes I need 14 in a row for a GPIO bank or similar. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005202872082.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005202872082.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003219096948.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003219096948.html Jumper wires are the fastest and easiest to work with, but as complexity grows things quickly get out of hand visually and spatially. Pre-cut wires are great, though I have some hot takes. First, for a long time I would carefully remove them from previous projects for reuse. I now believe that this is objectively bad because they grow brittle and become harder to re-insert. Instead, think of them like sandpaper, which has an obvious point of diminishing return. Throw them away as you use them up and order more when you're running low. My main beef with pre-cut wires is that for reasons that anger me every time I think about it, they all come in lengths that increment by one 2.54mm unit up until about 10 lengths, at which point they start jumping to arbitrary lengths. So you end up either a) using two wires to cover a distance or b) with an overly long wire that you need to manage.
- varjag 8mo agoOne thing I like for prototyping with through hole parts is Verowire pen which kind of combines wire wrap with soldering. It uses thin wire in self-fluxing insulation. You can use the pen to wrap a bunch of components that go in series without wasting time for trimming the wire to length. Then you solder over the wraps and bite off the runs that shouldn't be there (e.g. when you wired a diode you remove the wire between its contacts).
- bsoles 8mo ago> ... regular wires with plastic isolation, but those can be a pain to strip, even with a semi-decent stripping tool. > Boil away a millimeter or 2 of enamel without cutting the wire off the spool. The person spends 18 seconds (see the video) to "boil away" and tin the tip of the enamel wire, yet complains about using a wire stripper to strip the wire in 5 seconds. I mostly use breadboards even with microcontroller stuff (at 16 MHz, or so), and never run into any problems for constructing semi-permanent circuits. The PCB version of breadboards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/571 https://www.adafruit.com/product/571) also work pretty well. There area also little PCB adaptors to integrate surface-mount components on breadboards that work well.