Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Breadboarding I”.
So, let’s just dive into it it’ll be kind of brief overview, but uh i’ve been uh working at make for about four years now i started working in make labs where we would test the projects for the magazine. We document them kind of find if they had any quirks, and so in that time i was able to kind of learn about electronics. I had no experience coming into it. I couldn’t program, i couldn’t really even use a breadboard, so here we are later. I think i figured out a couple things and hopefully we’ll go over those tips and tricks to help you out, but my background is actually mechanical engineering and so from that kind of in the bottom you can see i really like interfacing sensors to arduino or microcontrollers. So, as alastair was mentioning and one of the things i’ve actually really enjoyed, has been building a cnc machine, and so that was the process of taking the electronics interfacing with the hardware and then making it all kind of synced together. So some common questions that sort of come up and that i’ve had experience with. Are you know why would i use a breadboard at all? How does it work it’s? You know this blank board how to use it. What do the lines mean? How do i put components into it? Also, what kind of prototyping boards or breadboards are out there and what should i use them for with my projects, and how can i interface them with what i’m using and then the best question always is.
Why would my circuit work and that’s going to be depending on the problem you have in the project you’re doing, but we’ll go over that and then finally, you know: what’s the next step, once you have a circuit on a breadboard, what what do you do with It so this kind of is the summary i think in my head as to why i use breadboards i’m trying to get this mess of circuits on the top and i’m trying to in the end get some final result, whether it’s a circuit board uh. This is the cnc machines, integrated components. I did not design that by any means, but that’s kind of the workflow, and so you want to get this tangle of wires computer chips ics and get them into something you can use and it’s reliable the other option or the other reason these are breadboard. Is you don’t want to get to this point in time when you’re trying to put all your stuff together and you’re going man which wire do i use? How do i connect it? Did the red wire go to the black wire and then you don’t even know if it works so before you get to soldering, it’s a great time put on a breadboard, make sure it works, make sure you have a great understanding of what’s going on with the Circuitry um and you can try to avoid some of these questions.
So to me at least breadboarding is a skill set. It’S this maker mentality that you can sort of develop and it’s something you should practice um. I never get my circuits right the first time and that’s why i always use a breadboard uh, no matter how hard i try, how careful you are, how simple the circuit you’re gon na. I always botch at least one connection up, and then you know if you’ve tried electronics, you know if one thing’s wrong it just usually doesn’t work at all. So breadboarding is a really great way to to quickly test your circuits to build prototypes, to go through the iterative process and figure out what works. What doesn’t work, maybe even you want to make a a final uh circuit board of your project.
How could you lay out the circuit so that they’re, space efficient or so that they use less power or so that they use less connections and then, as always, they’re great? Because you can reuse the components you don’t have to solder things onto a perf board to get your final circuit and when you’re done you just pull them off, put them in your bin and use them for the next project. So this is a great illustration that we had um one of our illustrators and this is sort of like the basics to breadboarding, so we’ll go over it. It shows you the breadboard. They come in various sizes as we’ll go over, but they’re, usually plastic.
You don’t need to use soldering at all and you basically have rails um. I have a mouse, do i so you have rails, you plug in your power supply, whether that’s a battery or a uh like a dc power. Jack from you know, cell phone chargers use them um and that’s gon na provide power to the board, and so from those connections. You then connect either jumper wires or other components and they pull the power from those those terminal connections. Um in the bottom left is going to be like an ic, an integrated circuit, maybe like a 555 timer chip that you want to program and in the middle of the boards. If you can see, there’s a deep trench and that’s that’s an actual physical disconnection. There’S there’s no connection between these two sides. So that’s great.
If you have components you want to add or you’re trying to connect, even like an arduino um on the illustration again, there’s uh. These tie points individual little divots that you see and then, if we go to the next slide, you can see that again the power strips they run down and these are all connected. So if you plug in you know top power connection, this whole rail becomes energized. Likewise, this blue rail, if you plug in your your ground terminal or whatever, have you that’s, that’s the whole ground for this one side, but again, this side of the board will not be connected at all. It will not be powered what you can do in the bottom right. Is you use like power jumpers, and so once you have your power source from your battery, you can run you know red cables, black cables and make a physical connection and then those sides of the boards they’re fully connected. So these are some types of breadboards. You may see some common ones, they come in opaque, colors like we have up here or the translucent, and you can actually see the physical connections and what they are is those metal contacts under the board, and so those metal contacts share whatever components. You’Re touching they’re like a node, a common node to your circuit um again as alastair, was mentioning multiple microcontrollers there’s some custom configurations, so you can easily kind of prototype with breadboards to your arduino, raspberry, pi beaglebone, and then they even come as small as the top Right corner left corner like a two by two or a two by three inch: here’s some of the bigger ones again they’re nice for space. I would highly recommend you know: don’t confine yourself to a small breadboard if you want to spread out, make big connections. That’S one thing i can’t stand is working a teeny, tiny spot and you have all this room and then, if you can see on the left, there’s different terminals and those actually, you can connect to power supplies bigger batteries and then use those to jump over to Your board so jumper wires. Those are what you use to connect, different components or the different power terminals, and they come usually two flavors there’s the solid core and those are rigid connections.
They’Re bendable. You can actually make them sort of bend and they’re, just usually like 22 gauge solid core wire. You can buy them in fancy, packs and they’re. Multiple colors or you can just buy a spool and make your own. Then there’s also the stranded wire and those have a stranded, cable inside they’re, flexible, there’s, usually rubber tips at the end, they’re really nice for really quick connections or for having a flexible circuit. If you want to actually interface with what you’re making and then when you’re actually building your circuit, i would highly recommend using a volt meter. You always want to make sure you have energy or electricity going to where you think it’s going um. Some of the biggest problems i have is i’ll connect up a battery to one terminal, i’ll think the whole board is powered and you go to start your project and there’s just no power, and if you have a volt meter handy or a conductivity, tester handy, you Can really quickly problem solve the other sort of trick? If you have a meso wire is kind of the first slide.
I showed if you hit the wires and your projects and it intermittently works. You know you have a short, and in that case it could be one your wiring or two. It could be the actual board itself. You know, as you use these boards over time, the connections become old, they become frayed um in internally in the board and they might not be making the connection you think they are. So if you have a volt meter or a multimeter check the conductivity.
So if you’re successful in some of your projects and using breadboards, this is a great example i love this show. I was the camp director for the 2012 uh google plus maker camp, and one of the campers showed me some of his projects and so timothy. This is his arduino interface laptop with arcade system he’s using the arduino to interface with the push buttons and then he’s actually got a sort of taken apart. I think it’s like an acer laptop with a lcd display and he actually keeps the breadboard as a final part of the project, which is great. You know it’s quick, it’s easy! When he’s done, he can take it apart.
If you want something more robust, you might actually transition to something like what i really like is fritzing and that’s an open source software, and it really helps you visually see where all your connections are going to go. It’S neat, it’s organized! You can share with others. You can get the components they’re in a library already for you and you can really see where everything is routed together and another great feature about fritzing. Is that once you’ve done the breadboard process, you can actually export it into a schematic.
So if you want to think about, you know uh, laying out the schematic how you’re going to share the information with other people. That’S another point: you can even take it further and do a layout for a pcb. So if you finally get to that final stage, you’re happy with the circuits, you love how this turned out. It’S actually working the way you want it to.
You can actually format it to either etch your own pcbs have them custom made by a manufacturer or still screen them. There’S tons of ways out there um. So that’s sort of the end end product that you can actually go to um. It was a little brief, but at this point any questions out there or uh all right great thanks.
You .