Neatness counts:Take your time to make your board neat and tidy. This
helps you to avoid mistakes and also helps you to troubleshoot if things
aren’t working quite right.Spacing:Leave yourself room to place items, allowing a little space between
them. It’s better to leave a little more space between elements and use a
bigger or expanded breadboard than to crowd yourself too much. This gives
you the space to modify and refine your circuit.Jumps:Minimize the jumps that you make between connections. (Typically,
this involves using a jumper wire.) For example, if you can insert one lead of
a component in the same row as the lead of another component you’re con-
necting to, you don’t have to use a jumper wire to connect them. The less
wiring you have, the less messy things get.Using color-coded wiring helps you to keep track of your layout. For example,
many people use black wire for ground and red wire for power. Put wires at
90° angles, not on the diagonal, because diagonal wires will get in the way of
other components to be placed on the board.Also keep wires to a practical length: that is, long enough so you can route
them around ICs but short enough so you don’t have lots of extra wire clut-
tering up your breadboard. (Routing wires around ICs means that if you have
to remove or replace an IC, you don’t have to remove all the wires as well!)Assorted lengths of prestripped wires are available that save you time in cut-
ting, stripping, and bending wires to length. You just pick one that’s already
cut to the right length. However, each length of these wires is a different
color; thus, if you use prestripped wires, you can’t color-code your circuit.
Because most of the photos in this book are black and white, we went for the
convenience of using prestripped wires rather than color-coding the wires on
the breadboard.Inserting wires and components ........................................................
In a nutshell, here’s how to wire a breadboard:- Use 22 gauge solid wire to make connections (see Figure 4-9).
Don’t use stranded wire because it can get smushed when you push it
into a hole and could even cause shorts in your circuit if a piece of wire
breaks off.
See the sidebar, “When stranded wire works,” for times when using
stranded wires is more appropriate.68 Part I: Project Prep