Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Getting Started with Breadboarding III”.
Okay, hi everyone. My name is Nick Raymond, we’re doing a talk today about getting start with breadboarding, do kind of a basic overview and a time that we have a little bit about myself. I started working at make about four years ago as an engineering intern, and so I work in make labs what we do there is. We would test the projects that were going to be published in the magazine, so we would go through the author’s article we’d see if there were any errors or if there was something that we couldn’t understand from the manuscript. And then we document that there at make HQ and then publish either our own photos or the author’s photos into the magazine, and so for years ago I had no experience programming whatsoever.
I had a basic knowledge of electrical components and, after you know working there and getting some experience, I was able to successfully put together a CNC machine from some kits, do a review and even learn to how to do some, my own soldering and circuit building. As you see in the bottom right, so pretty positive experience overall and I started most of it on a breadboard, so some of the common questions that sort of come up – you know I’m talking to friends or talking to people here Maker Faire. Are you know? Why would you want to use a breadboard at all? Secondly, I know: how does it work, what how does the breadboard cell function and what are the different areas on the breadboard? What types of bread boards should i be using for my own projects, and how can i implement those either in projects i’m doing currently or projects that i have planned for the future? The hardest question of all is usually: why won’t my circuit work and that’s going to be a case-by-case basis, but there’s a few things we can check. Can I go through the list before you just give up and throw it against the wall, and then finally, you know what do I do next, once you have the circuit working on the breadboard and it functions, what you want to? Where do you go from there? So we’ll kind of talk about some of those options as well, so throughout the talk, hopefully kind of keep the top picture in mind.
You know this is wikipedias version of a breadboarding and it’s been similar experience for myself using jumper wires. You got a bunch of those black chips or like integrated circuits ICS. Sometimes you have switches, capacitors resistors. What have you either making an analog or digital circuit, or sometimes you just gon na wire up a microcontroller and when I’m going through the red boarding process? My my end goal is usually something in like the bottom screen.
It’S usually hopefully going to you know, function it’s going to be a circuit board, some sort. This again is the the professional circuit boards that are in the CNC machine kit that I showed you earlier, but the workflow is sort of you know, get your prototype onto a breadboard in some fashion, make sure that it works test out the circuit, and then you Know if your end goal is to have a final finished product, you know the workflow kind of progresses from there. Additionally, when you’re, you know a reason to use a breadboard. Odd is so you don’t do this, and this is when you are in the soldering mode. You know I learned to solder again four years ago and and once you learn to solder, if you haven’t already, you just want to start soldering components to breadboards eat. If you don’t know, if that’s how they go, and so you don’t want to get to the stage in the project where you’re trying to put it together, you’re trying to make a final component and you don’t know where the red wire goes, you don’t know if It’S going to work, and so to avoid this I would suggest you know you take the time slow down and grab a breadboard when possible. Additionally, the way I approach breadboarding is it’s a skill set it’s a process, so the more you do it, the better you’ll become at the faster it’ll, get the more you’ll be able to problem, solve your own circuits and rely less and less on others to help You out, but again it’s a way to quickly test the circuit, if you have to, if you want to build just a prototype, you’re, not ready for the final stage of design, or maybe you want to make a bunch of revisions to the circuit at hand. You want to see how it’ll fit on the breadboard.
What happens if I put the circuit components on this part, can I rear out power? Can I save components that way, and then I love it because at the end of the day you can just take off those components. You got to go out and buy a new set, nothing’s soldered in place. You just pick them off put them back in your electronics bin and you can use them for our future project. So let’s go into the red war itself, maybe some of the layouts.
If it’s new to you, this is Alice tration that we had one of our else. Traders do from make the bread work comes in various sizes will show. But the illustration has like a rectangular one and there’s. Basically, the breadboard is split into two sections: there’s a deep trench, visible running down the center of it and that physically separates the left-hand side from the right-hand side. So those there’s no electrical connection between those two left right hand: sides. If you look in the top right-hand corner, there’s a battery or as some kind of a power supply that you usually linked in to the breadboard and again there’s a positive and negative terminal – that’s marked for convenience, you don’t have to use those, but that’s usually a Good place to start, and so with these types of red boards, when you put in a positive or negative terminal into that location, the entire sort of up and down column will all be connected.
That’S the same note the same circuit. Likewise, with that negative terminal that whole up and down row to the column is going to be the same. Electro circuit we’ll see when you move over to this sort of the the multiple areas where you see the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or the 5 10. 15.
20. Those rows those types – that’s not the case. They actually run horizontal well, as an exhibition will show again in the bottom left-hand corner, there’s the trench. I was talking about and that’s great for using and graded circuits, like a 555 timer chip or maybe like a 80 mega you’re going to emulate in Arduino and then the tie points.
If that’s, what you want to call them little divots the trenches, the little holes in here that you actually insert the legs of the components. Moving back to the top right hand, corner you see, there’s an LED and a resistor, and so the one of the legs of the LED and the resistor wish. I have a house they’re actually tied together on the same node and that’s because when you put components on the same row, this case row 16. That’S the same electrical node connection. So, where you see the longer lead of the LED that’s connected to the negative terminal and then the resistor is actually connected to the positive terminal kind of moving ahead again. There’S the power bus, the ground, bus and that fashion and then, as shown in the top right-hand corner, that’s that’s that connection.
That’S the same! Node again, there’s some connectivity components! Resistor! I sees the IC and the resistor again they’re sharing a same connection in this way. Yet again from the example, you can see that the resistor is actually connecting the IC to the positive terminal for the positive bus and the bottom illustration. There are example of jumper wires and the jumper wires are another way to connect components to your circuit. You can either use resistors capacitors components to physically connect a point on the circuit to another point, or you can use jumper cables, we’ll talk about jumper cables in a second just to refresh here’s some more bread boards.
They come in various sizes like the the board. I have a pier, i prefer it’s a much larger platform, there’s tons of area to work on. You can build a couple, different components or come in circuits. If you want, in various spaces, use the same positive negative terminals or in the top left-hand corner, you could go as small as like a 2 inch by 3 inch breadboard and that would actually fit on top of like a maker shield.
If you’re familiar, you can prototype on top of the Arduino itself or if you have microcontrollers on hand the Raspberry Pi, the Arduino, the BeagleBone, they make metal plastic boards. You can actually just physically connect the microcontroller and a breadboard on the same space, and that way you can move them down, carry them together, keep them kind of organized. Also in the top right, you can get translucent plastics and then you can actually see the metal connections under the plastic itself and that’s what’s actually connecting the components together. There’S a physical connection when you push in the legs of the components and they make contact with those electrical, basically there’s two running pairs and it become connected so similar to the board I have up here.
What’S not shown is the yellow red, green, yellow, red, green and black twist connections, and you can actually use an external power supply to tie these together and then from those connections jump that over to any part of your breadboard that you want. That’S a great feature. Have it makes it so you can jump, you know, maybe external power supply, that’s 12 volts that have a common ground and then connect, maybe a solenoid or some higher energy requiring device like a motor and then here you’re going to the jumper wires. So there’s two flavors there’s the solid core which are great for you can bend them and actually add 90 degree elbows into them and really keep your voice or guys or you can use the stranded wire and those are really great because they’re flexible, you could actually Make a circuit you can kind of move around it’ll actually give the one thing personally for me is when I use that stranded wire.
I have a tendency of getting really messy, really quick, just because you’re not taking the time to make these nice paths, and so when you’re troubleshooting, if you have to that, can make it a little challenging. If you can’t really visually see where your connections are going with the solid core wire, you could buy them in these jumper packs they’re. You know ten twelve dollars, they’re color-coded they come pre-cut. The wires are stripped for you at the ends. You just push them in and they’re great or you could just buy a spool of 22 gauge wire and make them yourself cut them to a custom length just strip off, maybe a quarter inch of the metal.
So you have a bear contact showing bend it at a 90 degree elbow and you’re ready to go a cheap alternative, so troubleshooting when you do make your circuit and it doesn’t work the way you want it to. I would highly recommend having a multimeter on hands that will allow you to test the voltage levels. Make sure that you have power on those power rails.
Make sure that you didn’t jump a wire to ground and you’re just shorting out your board completely. You can also use the conductivity meter and make sure that the connections you think you made are actually connected to the locations you want and then. Finally, if you have the stranded cable and it’s a mess sort of like that original picture, I showed you a quick test. I like to do. Is you put your hand on top and you just sort of squish the cables and if all of a sudden, your lights started flickering or your motors start turning, you know it’s a bad connection, either with your jumper wires or the board itself, and so that will Indicate either you need a new wire somewhere, you have to go through and figure it out or maybe, if your board is old or you’ve used it a bunch or you inherited it, there might be a bad connection itself on the breadboard and that’s actually pretty common And really frustrating because it’s hard to figure it out unless you build a circuit and test it and just doesn’t work. So, there’s that once the circuit is working properly, you probably will see something either two forms: either you’ll integrate the breadboard into your final product and it’ll. Look something like maker camper, Timothy’s, laptop arcade prototype. He embedded the breadboard the Arduino and I have basically a botched laptop into an acrylic enclosure and he just kept that, as is, he has the breadboard to the left hand, side of the control buttons and he’s using that. That’S great. If you were to bring it to maker faire, the only problem is in transport. If you put that on your luggage or have you shipped it, the vibrations are likely to cause the jumper cables to come out. And if you didn’t document it carefully, it’d be a heck of a time trying to figure out where those are supposed to go back.
In so it’s one thing to consider, so in that case, if you want to actually continue the prototyping process and make a final circuit, you can use a program that i really appreciate and like to use its held Fritzing. It’S an open source program and you can actually use it to lay out what the breadboard will look like. You can document it and once you have the circuit, looking how you want to on the computer, you can they take it to the next stage and you can actually produce a schematic and from there you can even produce PCB layout and have the board etched or Machines or other types of manufacturing processes, so it’s a great program. It runs on mac and windows.
It’S great, if you just don’t, have a quite a sense of how you want the circuit to be laid out. What you know you want to have. Maybe a couple resistors, maybe an Arduino and it’ll, really help you visualize before you ever start building where the wires go, where the connections go, and then you can export it.
If you want to share that online oftentimes, I prefer to work off of this image because it’s more sort of mimics what you’re going to be visually working with sometimes schematics. The way they’re made they’re a little a little hard to interpret right off the bat. But here you know, you need a breadboard, you need your Arduino and a bunch LEDs and resistors, and you can kind of work from there.
So that’s pretty much all that I had prepared thanks again for hanging out i’ll, be at the make booth if you guys haven’t come over to visit they’re talking about microcontrollers as well, but i thought i would take this time also, if you had any specific questions About projects you’re currently working on or wanted to work on and just chat about some questions you had otherwise yeah. That’S it thanks. .