72 Nicolas Collins
Chapter 19: From Breadboard to Circuit Board
You will need:
- Your breadboarded circuit from the previous experiment.
- A full duplicate set of parts used in the circuit.
- Circuit board (see text.)
- 14 pin IC socket.
- Solid and stranded hookup wire.
- Hand tools & soldering iron.
The breadboard is great for prototyping -- mistakes are easily undone -- but not
very stable if you want to take your music on the road. At some point you may
wish to solidify the circuit. This means soldering the components down on one
of a number of circuit boards that are made for this purpose. These boards have
buses and interconnected rows similar to the breadboard (Radio Shack part #276-
170 mimics a breadboard exactly -- Figure1) or patterns of individual copper
pads that can be linked together with bits of wire any way you wish (Figure 2.)
(There’s a third kind of board, with long, parallel strips of conductor on one side,
but assembling a circuit on one of these involves a fair amount of pre-planning
and trace cutting, and I don’t recommend it for your first project.)
Figure 1 Figure 2Once you’ve got a circuit board, start by placing a 14-pin IC socket on the side of
the board that does not have the copper paths and pads (this is the “component
side” -- the other side is the “solder side.”) Push the pins gently through the
holes, insuring that, if there is a matrix of rows and columns like on the
breadboard, the socket is similarly positioned, with a rows fanning out from each
pin, not shorting them all together. Make sure all the pins go though fully, and
none are bent over on top of the board. Solder the socket pins carefully, and
avoid letting blobs of solder short together adjacent pins or copper traces. The IC
is inserted into this socket when you have finished all your soldering, which
protects the chip from damage by the heat of the iron and makes it easier to
replace the chip if it blows out later.