Mailbag: Moving from breadboard to protoboard

Ryan writes in,

And it's a good question.

It turns out that we don't actually use solderless breadboards all that often-- most of our physical prototyping is soldered directly on perfboards, like so:

However, that's an acquired skill, and there is indeed a bit of a leap from breadboard...

... to protoboard:

Now, it turns out that there's actually a neat and happy medium from (of all places) Radio Shack: A protoboard shaped and wired up like a breadboard.

Ours is in older packaging, but catalog number 276-170 is still around, still cheap, and as they say, "available at most stores."

The bottom side of the board has the same wiring as a typical solderless breadboard, albeit with only one stripe down each side.

This layout means that you can usually duplicate your breadboard circuit exactly, soldering as you go, to make a permanent copy of your breadboarded one.

Doing so, you also get familiar with the process of soldering parts together on the protoboard-- a useful skill, especially if you ever need to build something that doesn't fit on a breadboard so easily.

Here's the top side of that board, which might look more familiar to breadboard fans.

Love that vintage Archer branding, which was lost somewhere along the way.