Ryan writes in,
| "I have a question about moving a project off a bread board and onto a project or perf board. Basically what is the best way to do without a lot of rework? This will be my first time doing this and I was just wondering if there were any best practices so that the final product looks clean and organized and I don't have mountains of solder on the back side." |
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.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/article.php/breadboardproto