I've breadboarded a number of projects, but always awem to hit a wall when faced with the concerns you describe. Do you have any pointers for how to gain the knowledge to get past this? Right now I feel like I dont even know what I dont know.
Some simple things that you shouldn't have to learn the hard way (but most people do):
Make sure your wiring contacts are electrochemically compatible. Gold-to-gold is safe in almost every household environment.
Strain relieve every wire. Solder is not meant to be structural.
Every circuit component degrades over time. Heat, humidity, and dust accelerates that process. Make a plan to mitigate the ingress of each, and a plan to account for that degradation.
Learn to design simple breakout-board carrier boards. The best breadboard layouts are still worse than a mediocre PCB, because the PCB doesn't have flywires to catch on literally everything.
Make sure you include mechanical support points for your designs, and pick the right size and material for your mechanical supports.
All of this to say, your hardware thing is a thing first, and an expression of your software/firmware design second. If it cannot physically survive being that physical thing, the elegance or resiliency of your code is meaningless.
- Don’t run data lines and power lines right next to each other (electric signals flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire, not in or on the metal itself)
- PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason. Bevel your corners. (You see examples of this on every board if you’re not sure what I mean)
- Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)
If your design suffers from the consequences of this, your reach has probably exceeded your grasp. Its true that you can get noise from sharp corners, but unless you're running SPI at maximum speed, it probably won't cause any bugs in your project. And if you need to run that fast, you're going to run into other, less straightforward signal integrity problems too.
PCBs with right angle trances look ugly though. So I might still judge you for it, but only if you also wear white before Memorial Day.
So, I do not use 90 degree turns for this reason, if not for the EMI reason.
That whole article addresses the myths surrounding right angle traces pretty effectively.
0. https://www.nwengineeringllc.com/article/right-angle-pcb-tra...
Not true. The electrons certainly do travel within the copper. The movement of the electrons generates a magnetic field around the conductor, but the electricity does not "flow through a field surrounding the trace/wire". The electric power absolutely does flow through the metal itself.
>PCB pros avoid right angles for the same reason.
This is a myth except maybe in very rare cases. Most hobbyists aren't ever going to have a problem with right angle traces.
https://www.nwengineeringllc.com/article/right-angle-pcb-tra...
>Verify PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components to it (or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time)
You should be sure that your design works before sending it to be assembled. If you designed the PCB with proper software that does analysis between the schematic and the PCB design, then there really shouldn't be any surprises that would require you to verify any PCB traces with a multimeter before soldering components. Sure you may have had it manufactured by a crap PCB company, but it's unlikely, PCBs have gotten really easy to make. Software like KiCad if used properly make it practically foolproof to design a PCB that matches the schematic.
Designing the schematic is another matter though, it's very easy for a noob to get that part completely wrong and testing PCB traces with a multimeter is not going to fix that.
>or if it’s been assembled by the PCB manufacturer, verify everything before powering it on for the first time
Not sure what that would accomplish. What are you going to test? Many components can't even be tested unless power is applied. Seems like you're suggesting superstition more than practical knowledge about hardware design and manufacture.
Look inside older stuff that predates 3d printing and cheap mold tooling, just to avoid the trap of everything being made the same way. In my case, since I'm interested in music, I've looked inside things like guitar pedals and amps, which often solve the problem of making something that's robust, but that can be made profitably in short runs and small shops.
Get a hold of the McMaster-Carr catalog, in paper form, and leave it in the bathroom. An old Digi-Key catalog if someone still has one.
Lots of other good in-the-trenches reporting of hard-won knowledge in the blog. Many epoxy resins shrink significantly, for example. That may or may not be important for your project. The blog is not super condensed but it's worth reading, especially for seeing the evolution of design and construction practise from the early years (2011) to now.
There's a book, now somewhat dated, on the Protection of Electronic Circuits from Overvoltages (lightning strikes, or fridge motors, for example): [2] TVSes (transient voltage suppressors) are still in use, however. Even varistors.
Connectors are the bane of every electrical engineer's life. There are more designs of connectors than of any other category of component, and probably there are good reasons for all of them to exist. I haven't got any good references for this topic though.
Other things like fuses, fireproof insulation on on your power cables, physical design such that prying objects can't touch high voltages, and so are about protecting the rest of the world from your projects.
Rod Elliott's web site [3] is a mine of information for beginning to intermediate hobbyists. It's focused on analog, audio specifically, but when you get down deep enough, everything in electronics is analog. you need to know about resistance, capacitance, and inductance, earthing (grounding) layout, and other similar topics.
1. https://thecavepearlproject.org/2023/03/17/waterproofing-you...
2. https://store.doverpublications.com/0486425525.html Available on Amazon as an ebook.