Wire-Free Electronic Prototyping Board | Hacker News Reader

Wire-Free Electronic Prototyping Board

crowdsupply.com

9 pointsjenlankford10 comments

This is a neat idea, but for complex circuits, it's impossible to follow. The meaningful elements (bridges and cuts) simply do not stand out against the regular backdrop of the criss-crossing traces. You don't see at a glance where the connections go.

With a regular one-sided strip board, at least the component side jumpers are perfectly clear.

Let's see, suppose I have two pins on separate traces on a regular strip board and these should be on the same network. So that is two solder joints to connect these pins to the board, then two more solder joints to install a jumper. Versus no jumper on the Perf+, but four solder bridges---and on two different sides of the board. A solder bridge near each pin to connect it to a trace.

The advantage of the trade-off is not so obvious at all. It's a bit more work to install a jumper: cutting it to approximately the same length, and holding it in place (with a "helping hands" or whatever) to solder it down neatly, then clipping the excess wire. Versus just solder bridging. The jumper wins in readability, though.

The esthetic appeal is undeniable: you have a board with nothing but solder and components.

This is pretty neat! It's an interesting bridge between perfboard and custom pcbs. Not sure if the price is worth the convenience though.

I agree on the price. I feel bad for being a scumbag but I might create a clone of this using an EDA package; doesn't seem too hard.

How much cheaper would it actually end up being if I wanted to do that, then have someone like batchpcb mfg a few? At $5/in^2 i don't think it's much better than buying from this guy.

This sounds like a confrontational question, and I tried rephrasing my question to not sound smarmy, but I am no expert (I have never actually ordered a custom pcb) and I am genuinely curious at what the options are.

You can get 10 5cm by 5cm boards from China for 10 bucks shipped.

It could be useful to incorporate as a "custom hacking area" in the middle of a design that is routed as a normal PCB.

"Revolutionary electronic prototyping board designed for ease of use and flexibility. No jumper wires required!"

So the inconvenience of using wires with a breadboard is replaced by the need to solder all components?

This is more of an alternative to strip board than to solderless prototyping.

The jumper wires that are eliminated are those that appear on stripboard designs; those jumpers are soldered in.

Makes sense, but the actual crowd-funding link specifically shows a breadboard with wires for the comparison (in the details section).

It does seem fairly complicated to map out the jumper rails, and especially since the rails run the length of the bird they can't be re-used unless they're cut, possibly limiting the utility.

I would have thought at the stage you'd want to use this, it's not marginally more cost or time to just print your own low-volume PCB. Or just use the wires.

I followed another link where someone reported that making that 3D printer controller Perf+ board (unpopulated!) took an hour and 15 minutes, claiming it compared favorably with making a PCB at home.

No way! From the moment I hit "print" on a laser printer to having the PCB etched and drilled could probably be half an hour or even less.

Also, I'm reasonably confident that the PCB will be free of issues, because I didn't take any steps whereby I manually transfer the details of the design to the item.

Taking an existing CAD design for a Perf+ board, and painstakingly cutting the traces and making the solder joints is time consuming, and error-prone. You have to read the coordinates of the solder joints and cuts and then perform them in the correct place; you're a human CNC machine, basically.

I rarely use prototyping boards for anything any more, unless it is extremely simple; I go straight to home-made PCB.

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