Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard?

[Tom Gardner]

On 17/09/14 07:25, Cydrome Leader wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Dolby_SR_breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

Four layer boards? No.
Poured copper areas? Tedious.
Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? <expletive deleted>

 

[Bob Masta]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
<Sophi.2@invalid.org> wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house, you can even use them free-hand in your
Dremel. The shanks are steel and handle plenty of side load
for carving... about anything short of dropping the Dremel
tip-down.

The tips themselves will last forever; the only ones I've
lost were by (ahem!) dropping the Dremel. I made a simple
metal sleeve to slip over the end of the Dremel to protect
the tip when not in use, and that's pretty much solved the
problem.

Dental burrs are fine for drilling use as well, but you can
only do one board at a time due to the tapered shank leading
to the ball tip.

Best regards,


Bob Masta

DAQARTA v7.60
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Scope, Spectrum, Spectrogram, Sound Level Meter
Frequency Counter, Pitch Track, Pitch-to-MIDI
FREE Signal Generator, DaqMusiq generator
Science with your sound card!

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 17/09/14 07:25, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin <jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman <gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Dolby_SR_breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

Or, more often, reduced 2:1 to B+W film to make the boards. The PCB
resist (usually KPR) was UV sensitive.

I didn't like the color stuff. It was hard to "edit" a layout, and the
color separation photography didn't work well. We could do tricks to
burn assembly and fab drawings when each layer was its own mylar,
which didn't work with colored tape.

Four layer boards? No.

Sure, we did those.

>Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Cut from Rubylith with an x-acto. That was as fast as CAD.

Lorry Ray could make a ground plane, or power pours, from the
padmaster mylar, using some photographic tricks.

Early ICs were designed with Rubylith and x-acto knives. People didn't
have metric rulers handy, so someone decided that there were 25 mm to
the inch.


>Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? <expletive deleted>

That's why we had a sheet of mylar for each trace layer.

The real annoyance of hand-taped PCB layout was checking. Checking
clearances and connectivity of a serious layout would take two people
two days. Now it takes seconds.

I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:06:58 GMT, N0Spam@daqarta.com (Bob Masta)
wrote:

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
Sophi.2@invalid.org> wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house,

Under $1 each on ebay.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Protos/Burr_1.JPG


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John S]

On 9/19/2014 10:38 AM, John Larkin wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 12:06:58 GMT, N0Spam@daqarta.com (Bob Masta)
wrote:

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 06:47:34 -0500, John S
Sophi.2@invalid.org> wrote:

On 9/17/2014 1:48 PM, Phil Hobbs wrote:
On 09/17/2014 12:02 PM, John S wrote:
On 9/16/2014 11:17 PM, Robert Baer wrote:
Don Kuenz wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz
Haven't we been thru this garbage before recently?


Yeah. But, is anyone interested in the way I do it? It's slightly
different from the rest of the posts.

I don't know. Are you good at it? All wisdom welcome!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I bought several sizes of diamond core drill bits that sand away copper
so that it leaves an isolated circular island of copper. On my (properly
adjusted) drill press, I can make lots of little islands of various
sizes on blank FR4 and use them for connection points. I use JL's
method of the Dremmel to make a VCC strip at a convenient edge and
solder bypass caps across the gap.

I've not found any problems with this method, but I'm not the SHF guru
you guys are.

If you get carbide-ball-tipped dental burrs from a dental
supply house,

Under $1 each on ebay.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Protos/Burr_1.JPG

Free for me. My partner's daughter and her husband are dentists.

 

[David Eather]

I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.

I agree absolutely about hand drawn, its perfect free form and so user
friendly. But no minions I'm afraid :-(

 

On Thu, 18 Sep 2014 20:23:03 -0700, Robert Baer
<robertbaer@localnet.com> wrote:

John Larkin wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2014 06:25:08 +0000 (UTC), Cydrome Leader
presence@MUNGEpanix.com> wrote:

In sci.electronics.repair John Larkin<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:
On Tue, 16 Sep 2014 03:02:11 -0400, rickman<gnuarm@gmail.com> wrote:

On 9/16/2014 1:58 AM, Cydrome Leader wrote:
In sci.electronics.repair Don Kuenz<garbage@crcomp.net> wrote:
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

This:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Dolby_SR_breadboard.jpg

It's a Dolby SR prototype of some sort.

Yeah, like I said, I always do PCB from the start. This one just has a
few more white wires than usual. Good thing he had all those
conveniently located vias. lol

Yeah, a real PCB could have been done faster than making that by hand.
And you could order 5 of them. If this was Dolby, the cost of a
quick-turn multilayer board would be trivial.

I'd cut them slack (and give some credit too) considering how old that
thing is. It's actually pretty cool. I had some 70s/early 80s
"Sega/Gremlin" arcade machine boards that all appeared to have been layed
out by hand with vinyl decals. Every single trace. boards and boards of
74xx series logic circling a z80 or something like that, all done by hand.
These were production boards, but somebody spend lots of time designing
those boards. Not sure what sort of board layout tools they had back then,
although they must have existed. Anybody know?

I used to lay out my own boards, decals and black crepe tape on
pin-aligned mylar. There would be a padmaster (pads only) and a
separate sheet for each trace layer. We sent it out to Lorry Ray in
Mountain View to be photographed. They could also do cool ground plane
tricks, all with wet photography. We'd send the film out to the fab
house and expect to get it back.

I still have a few layouts around, to show the kids. It was labor
intensive.


(Around here, a lot of the people that you interview have worked for
Dolby. Turnover seems pretty high. They are like ILM, expecting people
to work for glory.)

Has Dolby done anything new or interesting in the past decade?

Big sound systems for movie theatres (a dying biz) and a new home 3D
sound system.


At the abusive prices it is no wonder that movie theaters are going
out of biz.

We go to the movie theater about once or twice a month. Movie
theaters aren't exactly going out of business here. In fact, new ones
are opening relatively often. As far as "abusive prices" go, I don't
consider $7 for a few hours of entertainment to be too bad.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 07:22:39 +1000, "David Eather" <eather@tpg.com.au>
wrote:

I still draw a lot, mechanical sketches and schematics. It's much more
intuitive to me than using a screen. I have minions who CAD my stuff
for me.



I agree absolutely about hand drawn, its perfect free form and so user
friendly. But no minions I'm afraid :-(

I draw schematics on D-size blue-grid vellum.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Circuits/Driver_Sh_1.JPG

Following the blue lines makes things pretty neat.

A 22x34 piece of vellum must have about 10 million equivalent pixels.
And I don't have to create a library part before I can draw it. I make
notes, calculations, graphs, tables on the drawings for future
reference, stuff that doesn't make it to the CAD schematics. It's hard
to lose a piece of D-size vellum.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Circuits/FilterBoard.jpg

Then, there is this style:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Circuits/jim_williams_schematic-1.jpg








--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[Tom Gardner]

On 20/09/14 01:52, John Larkin wrote:

Then, there is this style:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/53724080/Circuits/jim_williams_schematic-1.jpg

Which I've always thought is arrogant in the sense it screams
"my time is worth more than the reader's time". Probably true
in my case, but I'd prefer not to be reminded about it.

I'm undecided whether that style is better or worse than
drawings which have inputs on the right and outputs on the
left

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

I can't seem to sleep. Good time for a rant.

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

At the risk of starting a nostalgia thread, we didn't use the
different colored tape method. Everything was done 2:1 or preferably
4:1. We used mylar sheets and an Xacto knife, Brady tape "donuts" for
pads, Brady black tape for traces, red rubylith for ground planes and
solder masks. Red photo opaque paint for touchup. I was marked for
an early death when I used one of draftings sacred Xacto knives to cut
traces on a PCB board. They had to be very sharp to work well for
working with rubylith.

I still have my seriously expensive E size 0.1" mylar alignment grid
somewhere. However, the glue on the tape and pads would dry out after
a few years. Most of my early layouts and layout supplies have long
ago dried out and were thrown out. The lifetime of these original
layouts sometimes defined the lifetime of the product as making
changes to a layout using a photographed enlargement or the negatives
or a PCB was not easy.

While computer layout to Gerber plots were common, I found myself
making changes and corrections to old PCB layouts using these methods
well into the 1990's. Old tech dies hard:
"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
<http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442>

In RF, it was common for the design engineers to participate directly
in the layout process. Most managers didn't want to waste expensive
engineering time on "menial" tasks, such as PCB layout and checking.
However, those with an interest in getting things right the first time
had other ideas and allowed direct involvement. For RF boards I would
locate the major RF components on a PCB, mark the location of
grounding holes, and make sure the RF path was reasonably straight,
didn't loop back on itself, devices were properly bypassed, and often
supplied the prototype PCB to the layout person. Just handing them
the schematic and parts list was an invitation to start over from
scratch. In honor of my involvement in this system, the drafting
department presented me with a "Change Everything" rubber stamp.

>Four layer boards? No.

Yes, although getting them right was difficult. Without computerized
rule checking, it was easy to create problems and not find them until
the prototype was built.

>Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Not really, at least for RF. The real PCB would be fair accurate
clone of the hand made prototype board. The ground plane was always
on top of the PCB. Where the prototype used routed clearances for
non-grounded areas, the PCB layout used rubylith with those areas cut
out with a swivel knife compass. It was a bit tedious, but not very
difficult. The hard part was reconnecting the "islands" of ground
with Brady black tape.

I tried to find examples of such layouts using Google image search and
found nothing. I'll see if I dig out some old photos.

>Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? <expletive deleted>

Yep. That's why we didn't use that method. Instead, we had multiple
layers of transparent mylar, with the layers aligned by punched holes
with "pins" and targets. With a 2 layer PCB, there would be 2 sheets
for the traces, and one each for the solder mask and silk screen. For
digital PCB's, we would use 3 layers. There would be a "pad master",
which was used for both the component and circuit side pads. The
other two sheets were just the traces for the component and circuit
sides. When photographed and reduced, the pad master was combined
with the traces to form the final image. The component outlines (silk
screen) were done by hand with an elevated template and india ink.
Every time components were moved due to a design change, the silk
screen had to be redone from scratch as making changes to the original
were difficult.

With luck everything would fit. With my luck, there could be
duplicate reference designators, test points under parts, traces
shorting to component cases, interchanged circuit and components side
copper, and a myriad of other layout mistakes that never seemed to
completely disappear. I never could get anything right the first.
There would always be mistakes. Even when everything seemed perfect,
somone might do something stupid, like leave the original "tape ups"
in a hot car, and have the pads and traces drift when the glue melts.
Traces and pads falling off on the way to the photographers was
common.

I once worked on a very simple design where I decided I was going to
have one PCB that worked the first time. Everything was triple
checked by 3 different people. Everything looked good until the PCB
arrived. The PCB fab shop had gotten the component and circuit side
reversed. Life was hell.

All of that changed when computerized layout and schematic capture
arrived. The term "capture" is rather interesting as I participated
in several ordeal processes of converting pencil drawings on velum to
vector line drawings on a computer. I think my first was in 1979(?)
on an Applicon CAD system running on a PDP11/34. Having an RF design
engineer doing board layout, mechanical design, and drawing schematics
was initially deemed a waste of time, so I had to do it after hours. I
wanted to experience the entire process, which proved worthwhile.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products. In the 1970's and
80's, I always did breadboards because there were so many unknowns
that could only be answered by building a prototype. Today, those
problems are anticipated by simulations and better characterized
parts. In other words, most of what I did back then is now totally
obsolete.



--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

[Ian Field]

"Don Kuenz" <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote in message
news:lv7d5m$hna$1@dont-email.me...

Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Williams_(analog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 07:41:50 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

On Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:14:09 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

I can't seem to sleep. Good time for a rant.

Back in the 70s people used blue and red tape taped out on the
same side of the same piece of plastic sheet, typically at 2:1
scale. The blue was the top copper, the red was the bottom
copper (or vv?!). It was projected through coloured filters
onto the light-sensitive etch resist.

At the risk of starting a nostalgia thread, we didn't use the
different colored tape method. Everything was done 2:1 or preferably
4:1. We used mylar sheets and an Xacto knife, Brady tape "donuts" for
pads, Brady black tape for traces, red rubylith for ground planes and
solder masks. Red photo opaque paint for touchup. I was marked for
an early death when I used one of draftings sacred Xacto knives to cut
traces on a PCB board. They had to be very sharp to work well for
working with rubylith.

We did black pads (padmaster) and black traces. The mylar sheets were
padmaster, top traces, bottom traces, assembly, and often a ground
plane thermals. Sometimes more layers. The photographer could make
ground plane film from the padmaster - all copper, clearances for the
pads, thermals added from the thermal sheet.

We did biggish boards, so worked 2x.

At Data General, only one person had a reserved parking spot: the
layout guy.

The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.

I still have my seriously expensive E size 0.1" mylar alignment grid
somewhere. However, the glue on the tape and pads would dry out after
a few years. Most of my early layouts and layout supplies have long
ago dried out and were thrown out. The lifetime of these original
layouts sometimes defined the lifetime of the product as making
changes to a layout using a photographed enlargement or the negatives
or a PCB was not easy.

While computer layout to Gerber plots were common, I found myself
making changes and corrections to old PCB layouts using these methods
well into the 1990's. Old tech dies hard:
"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.

In RF, it was common for the design engineers to participate directly
in the layout process. Most managers didn't want to waste expensive
engineering time on "menial" tasks, such as PCB layout and checking.
However, those with an interest in getting things right the first time
had other ideas and allowed direct involvement. For RF boards I would
locate the major RF components on a PCB, mark the location of
grounding holes, and make sure the RF path was reasonably straight,
didn't loop back on itself, devices were properly bypassed, and often
supplied the prototype PCB to the layout person. Just handing them
the schematic and parts list was an invitation to start over from
scratch. In honor of my involvement in this system, the drafting
department presented me with a "Change Everything" rubber stamp.

Four layer boards? No.

Yes, although getting them right was difficult. Without computerized
rule checking, it was easy to create problems and not find them until
the prototype was built.

We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.

Poured copper areas? Tedious.

Not really, at least for RF. The real PCB would be fair accurate
clone of the hand made prototype board. The ground plane was always
on top of the PCB. Where the prototype used routed clearances for
non-grounded areas, the PCB layout used rubylith with those areas cut
out with a swivel knife compass. It was a bit tedious, but not very
difficult. The hard part was reconnecting the "islands" of ground
with Brady black tape.

I tried to find examples of such layouts using Google image search and
found nothing. I'll see if I dig out some old photos.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.

Lifting a blue track layed under a red track? <expletive deleted

Yep. That's why we didn't use that method. Instead, we had multiple
layers of transparent mylar, with the layers aligned by punched holes
with "pins" and targets. With a 2 layer PCB, there would be 2 sheets
for the traces, and one each for the solder mask and silk screen. For
digital PCB's, we would use 3 layers. There would be a "pad master",
which was used for both the component and circuit side pads. The
other two sheets were just the traces for the component and circuit
sides. When photographed and reduced, the pad master was combined
with the traces to form the final image. The component outlines (silk
screen) were done by hand with an elevated template and india ink.
Every time components were moved due to a design change, the silk
screen had to be redone from scratch as making changes to the original
were difficult.

With luck everything would fit. With my luck, there could be
duplicate reference designators, test points under parts, traces
shorting to component cases, interchanged circuit and components side
copper, and a myriad of other layout mistakes that never seemed to
completely disappear. I never could get anything right the first.
There would always be mistakes. Even when everything seemed perfect,
somone might do something stupid, like leave the original "tape ups"
in a hot car, and have the pads and traces drift when the glue melts.
Traces and pads falling off on the way to the photographers was
common.

I once worked on a very simple design where I decided I was going to
have one PCB that worked the first time. Everything was triple
checked by 3 different people. Everything looked good until the PCB
arrived. The PCB fab shop had gotten the component and circuit side
reversed. Life was hell.

All of that changed when computerized layout and schematic capture
arrived. The term "capture" is rather interesting as I participated
in several ordeal processes of converting pencil drawings on velum to
vector line drawings on a computer. I think my first was in 1979(?)
on an Applicon CAD system running on a PDP11/34. Having an RF design
engineer doing board layout, mechanical design, and drawing schematics
was initially deemed a waste of time, so I had to do it after hours. I
wanted to experience the entire process, which proved worthwhile.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!


In the 1970's and

80's, I always did breadboards because there were so many unknowns
that could only be answered by building a prototype. Today, those
problems are anticipated by simulations and better characterized
parts. In other words, most of what I did back then is now totally
obsolete.

--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
<gangprobing.alien@ntlworld.com> wrote:

"Don Kuenz" <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote in message
news:lv7d5m$hna$1@dont-email.me...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Williams_(analog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[John S]

On 9/15/2014 2:03 PM, Don Kuenz wrote:

Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

TIA.

--
Don Kuenz

Sometimes. Depends on the situation.

 

[Phil Hobbs]

On 9/20/2014 2:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
gangprobing.alien@ntlworld.com> wrote:



"Don Kuenz" <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote in message
news:lv7d5m$hna$1@dont-email.me...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Williams_(analog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.

For a guy with very little formal training and almost no math at all, he
did a remarkable amount. Errol Dietz, who used to be CTO of National,
started out as Bob Pease's technician.

Gotta hand it to folks like that.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

160 North State Road #203
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

hobbs at electrooptical dot net
http://electrooptical.net

 

[Ian Field]

"Phil Hobbs" <hobbs@electrooptical.net> wrote in message
news:541DD853.9060204@electrooptical.net...

On 9/20/2014 2:04 PM, John Larkin wrote:
On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:19:53 +0100, "Ian Field"
gangprobing.alien@ntlworld.com> wrote:



"Don Kuenz" <garbage@crcomp.net> wrote in message
news:lv7d5m$hna$1@dont-email.me...
Do you personally use a plastic solderless breadboard for your
prototypes?

http://www.ebay.com/sch/items/?_nkw=solderless+breadboard

If not, what do you use for your prototypes?

Here's the undisputed king of prototyping;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Williams_(analog_designer)

He published vast amounts of application notes with plenty of
photographic
evidence.

Jim, rest his dear soul, was something of a hack. Much of his stuff
was over-the-top complex, and his idea of stabilizing any control loop
was to add a huge cap somewhere.

I met him a couple of times at the Foothill flea market. He was nice
and seemed sort of shy. Unlike Bob Pease, who was really out there.


For a guy with very little formal training and almost no math at all, he
did a remarkable amount. Errol Dietz, who used to be CTO of National,
started out as Bob Pease's technician.

Gotta hand it to folks like that.

Some of the best appnotes came out of LT (and NS) - unfortunately the bulk
of my junkbox is salage. AFAICR I've yet to find any LT parts in anything.

NS is pretty much a second source supplier too, I almost never find any
parts that are uniquely theirs in anything.

The last NS only part I found was a Boomer stereo amp chip, it was a sort of
large wallet thing with CD pockets, the amp and speakers were bonded into
the foam padding - you had to provide your own CD - "Walkman" device.

 

[Jeff Liebermann]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:00:09 -0700, John Larkin
<jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

>The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.

Agreed.

"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

Yep. I brought in a NuArc light table that I inherited from a
previous print shop adventure. The lighting was superb, fairly cool,
and the table big enough for most PCB's. Something like this:
<http://www.ebay.com/itm/321208321135>
I dragged it through 2 employers, several long term consulting jobs,
and two home business ventures.

At the time, leaning over the table for hours was not particularly
difficult. Today, it would give me back pains in about 15 minutes.
Yep, a young body was a requirement. As I vaguely recall, the oldest
PCB layout person I knew that did layout on mylar was about 25 years
old.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.

Yep. I learned the hard way NOT to run the layout and blueprint paper
through the rollers on the Diazit(?) machine. Destroying the mylar
original was not a good thing. I had a sheet of plywood and a loose
glass plate. I would pile everything between the plywood and glass
plate, and take it outside for the exposure. Most of the time, the
registration was tolerable. At one company, we did have a UV light,
but it was constantly being "borrowed" by the CEO's son for his
psychedelic light show parties.

We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.

That was suggested many times. However, the schedule never permitted
it. Management tended to prefer doing things over rather than getting
it right the first time. I was not in a position to change that even
though the damage it caused was obvious to everyone involved.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
<http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/>
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!

Never having announced or never having done full breadboards? I'll
assume never having done full breadboards.

You gave me quite a shock when you mentioned that. I've always built
breadboards of everything I've done. At first, I didn't think it was
possible to bypass the breadboard stage. I then talked to others in
the business and found that few have the time or justification to do
full breadboards. Many things have changed between the 1970's and
today. Mostly, the components have become so small, that building a
breadboard (much less the real product) by hand would be impossible. I
tried it with a PCB that had a few 0603 resistors and decided that it
wasn't going to happen. Better to go directly to the PCB. Also, as I
mentioned, modeling, simulations, and better characterization of the
components have also improved the situation.

Back to refurbishing a sewing machine. One can't do electronics full
time.

--
Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

 

Followups set to s.e.design.

In sci.electronics.basics Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com> wrote:

Yep. I learned the hard way NOT to run the layout and blueprint paper
through the rollers on the Diazit(?) machine.

Ah, a diazo copier. I first, and last, used one in high school drafting
class, around 1989. I remember that it was the first time I had seen a
peristaltic pump, and that after several guys had made copies on it, the
ammonia fumes would start to fill the room. The usual remedy was to
open the windows, even in January in Kansas City. Who needs OSHA or a
MSDS, anyway.

At one company, we did have a UV light, but it was constantly being
"borrowed" by the CEO's son for his psychedelic light show parties.

At a job about 7 years ago, the Panasonic 32" professional flat-screen
monitor (full HD, metal case, serial port, HD-SDI inputs - a few grand
at the time) was absent one Monday morning. After a search of the
building and general denials, the boss was preparing to phone the
police. Just then, a person in the same position showed up, and
admitted that he had taken it home over the weekend to watch the ball
game.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/

In the flesh, but as Rev D, as opposed to the Rev B artwork above:
http://www.amazon.com/Ftg-Data-Systems-SYSTEMS-PXL-350/dp/B00456W0L2

In June 1986, you could get this board, an FT-156 light pen, *and* a
free copy of Windows (about what it was worth, then), for the low low
price of $349! Roughly $760 today, according to the bls.gov calculator,
so probably even more than that. Source: ad in the June 10, 1986 "PC
Magazine", probably not available at
<http://books.google.com/books?id=pDGnxFyejN4C&lpg=PA313&ots=DAVcJi5l05&pg=PA313#v=onepage&f=false>
or maybe even http://is.gd/0iHSD5 .

> I've always built breadboards of everything I've done.

At the few places I've worked where they made boards from scratch, it
depended on the board. Simple stuff (microcontroller, a few LEDs)
didn't get breadboarded. Complex stuff (like a several-hundred-watt
1 GHz transmitter) had some sections breadboarded, like the final
amplifier and maybe some of the filtering. Then they would order three
boards, stuff and test, and usually end up doing one spin of the board.
This was recent enough that it was all CAD.

Matt Roberds

 

[John Larkin]

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 17:22:29 -0700, Jeff Liebermann <jeffl@cruzio.com>
wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 11:00:09 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

The best layout people I have worked with were women. True today.

Agreed.

"How It Was: PCB Layout from Rubylith to Dot and Tape to CAD"
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=14&doc_id=1285442

A good light table, and a young body, were necessary for hand-taped
layout.

Yep. I brought in a NuArc light table that I inherited from a
previous print shop adventure. The lighting was superb, fairly cool,
and the table big enough for most PCB's. Something like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/321208321135
I dragged it through 2 employers, several long term consulting jobs,
and two home business ventures.

At the time, leaning over the table for hours was not particularly
difficult. Today, it would give me back pains in about 15 minutes.
Yep, a young body was a requirement. As I vaguely recall, the oldest
PCB layout person I knew that did layout on mylar was about 25 years
old.

You also needed a flat table with an overhead UV light, for burning
sepia assembly and fab drawings from the various mylar layers. And a
blueline machine of course.

Yep. I learned the hard way NOT to run the layout and blueprint paper
through the rollers on the Diazit(?) machine. Destroying the mylar
original was not a good thing. I had a sheet of plywood and a loose
glass plate. I would pile everything between the plywood and glass
plate, and take it outside for the exposure. Most of the time, the
registration was tolerable. At one company, we did have a UV light,
but it was constantly being "borrowed" by the CEO's son for his
psychedelic light show parties.

You didn't literally need a UV light. A 250-watt warehouse-type
mercury vapor lamp, maybe 6 feet above a table, worked fine.

We didn't have trouble with multilayers. We just checked the layouts
(and the film!) a lot. Most boards worked first time; still do. A
couple days of overboard checking pay off.

That was suggested many times. However, the schedule never permitted
it. Management tended to prefer doing things over rather than getting
it right the first time. I was not in a position to change that even
though the damage it caused was obvious to everyone involved.

I still have a few mylar layouts around. I'll post pics if anyone is
interested.

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

Ooh, curved traces. I was taught to never do that, on the theory that
the tape would eventually creep in the corners.

When I first jumped into this newsgroup in about 2011, I got an
initial surprise when the other JL (John Larkin) announced that he
doesn't do full breadboards of complete products.

I never have!

Never having announced or never having done full breadboards? I'll
assume never having done full breadboards.

Right. I only breadboard little snippets of circuits. For most
designs, I don't breadboard anything. What with ARM CPUs and FPGAs and
all those tiny parts, breadboarding doesn't work.

It's faster and better to lay out a board, check the heck out of it,
have manufacturing build a couple, and test it.

I know companies that define "breadboard" "prototype" "beta"
"pre-production" "pilot production" and "production". And use all of
them. Takes them years to finish anything. They assume the first few
iterations will have errors, so they do.


--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin att highlandtechnology dott com
http://www.highlandtechnology.com

 

[rickman]

On 9/20/2014 11:01 PM, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Sat, 20 Sep 2014 18:25:05 -0700, John Larkin
jlarkin@highlandtechnology.com> wrote:

I found one of my layouts from 1985:
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/PCB-Layout/
It's a light pen interface card for the IBM PD as a 16 bit ISA card. I
did a lousy job and am not very proud of it. However, it does show
what was typical of 1970's PCB layout technology. If anyone wants
details or more drawings, please say something as all of this is going
into the trash in a few daze.

Ooh, curved traces. I was taught to never do that, on the theory that
the tape would eventually creep in the corners.

That does happen if one stretches the tape when laying a trace. It's
especially bad with narrow traces. Traces will move, especially if
the layout is left in the sun. I used a rubber roller from my wet
photography kit, to flatten the traces and make sure they're properly
stuck to the mylar. (Incidentally, note that I used acetate instead
of mylar in the above layout. Not a good idea and I forgot why I did
it).

For RF, rounded corners are a problem due to impedance bumps.

From the source you cite:
"If you use a radius greater than three times the line width, you will
have a transmission line that is almost indistinguishable in impedance
characteristics from a straight section."

So where is the problem?

Sharp
corners are equally bad due to reflection problems. The compromise is
a chamfered corner (mitered bend):
http://www.microwaves101.com/microwave-encyclopedia/480-mitered-bends
which unfortunately also makes a tolerable fuse at the bend.

My understanding the reflection idea is also a myth but rather the real
issue is the impedance change due to the added capacitance of the
corner, which is also supported by your reference. Impedance changes
will also cause reflections, but the signal does not reflect from the
corner itself like a light beam.

--

Rick