On 17 Feb 2010 at 19:27, Tony Duell wrote:
Why on earth do you need to make a special PCB
for a one-off prototype
or experimental circuit? If you use through-hole components, DIP, or
PLCC ICs (in their sockets), or mount SOICs and PQFPs or adapter
boards, you can hand-wire the circuit on stripboard or sqaure pad
board in less time than it takes to design the PCB.
If it's a board of any scale (8+ ICs), I prefer to wire-wrap it
myself. I start with one-sided FR4 0.060 PCB blank, drill it for
Indeed. Wire-wrapping is very relaible and quick to do. The only downside
is the price of the wire-wrap sockets.
I have never seen wire-wrap PLCC sockets, but it's easy to plug a normal
through-hole PLCC socket into wire-wrap pin strips. It's probably not so
reliable to do that, but I've never had serious problems.
pins, and run a bare +Vcc bus on the non-copper side
of the board.
Gives me a great ground plane and is easy to rework.
Another trick I've used is to make little 'mounts' by soldering DIL
sockets to the commer side of stripboard and then to stich the non-copper
side to a pice of copper-clad board (as a ground plane). Use the sorted
connections to said copper ground plane for grounds nad decoupling caps,
of course. I've run things like that at 100MHz+ with no problems.
-tony