surrounded by a plastic insulator, usually called hookup wire.Hookup wire
comes in various diameters referred to as a gauge.The standard gauge mea-
surement used in the U.S. is American Wire Gauge, also referred to as AWG.
We generally use 22 gauge or 20 gauge wire.Someone decided at some point that the smaller the gauge, the larger the
diameter of wire. For example, 20 gauge wire is 0.032" in diameter, and 22
gauge wire is 0.025" in diameter. Don’t ask us why — just memorize this fact!We use 22 gauge solid wire for most of the projects in this book. (Okay, in two
chapters, we use 20 gauge; and in one, we use 26 gauge, but you’ll find out
why when you get to those projects.)Use solid wire — never stranded wire — between components within a
breadboard because stranded tends to separate when you try to insert it into
the holes of a breadboard.You can buy hookup wire in spools; we generally get spools containing 100
feet of wire. If you are starting with only a few projects, you can get smaller
spools containing as little as 30 feet of wire.The insulating plastic that surrounds wire is made in different colors. Pick up
a spool of red and a spool of black. Using different colors helps you to iden-
tify the purpose of different wires in your project.You might also consider buying an assortment of different lengths of pre-
stripped and prebent 22 gauge wire jumpers. Jumper wires— which are used
to connect components in a breadboard — save you a lot of time you might
otherwise spend cutting small wires to length, stripping them, and bending
the stripped wire when you’re building a breadboard.Chapter 3: Assembling Your Electronics Arsenal 57
Insulating those naked wires
You will also use various materials to insulate
bare wires. You can use electrical tape, for
example, to insulate solder joints that might
touch each other and cause a short.
Heat shrink tubing is a tidy way to insulate the
point where wires connect in a solder joint.
Heat shrink tubing is simply a plastic tube.
When you slip a short length of this tubing over
a solder joint and apply heat, the plastic tube
shrinks, providing an insulating layer around the
wire. When working with 22 gauge wire, we use(^3) ⁄ 32 " heat shrink tubing.
Liquid electrical tape is also handy to insulate
bare wire in situations where heat shrink tubing
or conventional electrical tape doesn’t work
very well. We use liquid electrical tape in
Chapters 5 and 10, for example.