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The Goal : To recreate this simple circuit as a permanent project on a PCB. |
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The previous project was to program a standalone arduino chip, the ATmega328P. It worked nicely on the breadboard,
and I was so pleased that I bought some more arduino ICs with the intention of creating a few little projects around the home.
This would require a more convenient way to program the ICs, as well as making a pcb for each project, so I decided to use
a bit of perfboard to create the circuit to program an arduino IC.
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Top view : Looks like a neat enough job, huh ? A ZIF socket to hold the 28 pin arduino IC, +5V and GND, and the components. |
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However, I found it to be a bit of a nightmare to do. The underside of the board shows what I did. This took me the best part of
a day, and was incredibly fiddly to get right.
Soldering a single component leg is quite easy and swift, given a bit of practice. The problem came with wiring one component to
another. You can see I tried a variety of wire types and techniques, to see what was easiest. None of them was great.
Given that it takes 5 minutes to recreate the breadboard option, I considered this to be a lesson well learned in finding the easiest
solution to any problem. This isn't it.
So I went back to web searching to look for a pre-fab board for this setup, and was surprised to find none.
I searched forums to look for advice, and others seem to have the same fiddly trouble.
Workarounds included
- something called stripboard, which I will try in the future.
- tying the component legs together to create the circuit before a dab of solder to seal the knot.
- Using wirewrap techniques; you can buy wirewrap sockets with extended legs for short-legged components.
In the meantime, I bought another breadboard and will saw it in half to get a low budget easy option. The components will poke
in quickly, and might be held in place with sellotape and gravity ?
| And underneath : |
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It works, by the way. The day wasn't wasted. But given more patience, I should also wire up a couple of LEDs to run the blink sketch, to check a sketch is uploading correctly.