My Top Ten Most Useful Breadboard Tips and Tricks

There's 6 inches of snow on the ground, and you're cooped up in the house. You have momentarily lost your motivation to work on your GPS-guided metal-cutting laser. There haven't been any new projects on your favorite site which have piqued your interest. What to do with yourself?

Well, how bout pimping up your breadboard and turning it into a lean, mean, digital-development machine?

This is a short list of the most useful breadboard tricks that I have picked up over the years. Hopefully there's something in here that you will find useful which you haven't already thought of.

Ok, I don't really have 10 tips to share; it just makes for a catchier title. :P

Step 1: Power Connector

Well, the first thing that a breadboard needs is power. Many breadboards come with binding posts. This is fine if you care to use them. But you still have to plug the wires into the board. I have messed this part up on occasion, mixing up the power and ground wires. Even though rare, this has usually resulted in rather annoying and/or expensive consequences. The solution I came up with is to always use 3-pin connectors.

See the following picture. It's made from SIP header pins and protoboard. After point-to-point wiring, it is covered with sculpting epoxy.

Step 2: Power and Ground Buses

There are times where it would be useful to dedicate some of the power and ground rails to different voltages. For me, this occasion has yet to arise. I decided to connect them permanently to reduce some of the clutter.

All you have to do is unscrew the breadboard from the backing, if it has one. Then cut away a strip of the foam backing with an Exacto knife. Next, solder the power and ground buses with some fine wire. Then cover with tape and screw it back onto the backboard.

Step 3: LED's

LED's are commonly used in the debugging/development of most any electronic circuit.

Well, these breadboard-friendly LED's aren't quite as quick to make as bending around some leads, but they are indefinitely reusable and will save you a lot of space on your breadboard.

Because they have a current-limiting resistor built-in and the lead-spacing is 0.4", they plug directly between your power/ground rail and the main breadboard section. And even better, they can be stacked side-by-side.

I used 0.03" thick single-sided pcb, 3mm LED's, 240R surface mount resistors, and SIP header pins to make these. The only trick is to leave the pins in the header until after you have soldered them, in order to preserve the spacing. And to get them to stack side-by-side, I ground the sides of the LED's a bit with a Dremel.

Here's a video showing how I made them:

http://s18.photobucket.com/albums/b103/klee27x/Published/?action=view&current=LED_BreadOut.mp4

Step 4: Buttons

Buttons, buttons, everywhere.

The ubiquitous 6mm tactile switch is another breadboard staple. When you need only 1 or 2, you can just stick them in the breadboard. But try using more than that, and you'll soon have buttons popping out by themselves all over the place, in addition to growing a nice plate of spaghetti.

The simple tactile switch's most common role is to provide a digital input by temporarily connecting an input pin to either the ground rail or the power rail. By making a button array, you can plug the ground/power rail in just once, and will also have a greater density of buttons that won't fall out. You can make your button array up to 3 buttons deep and still take up the same number of breadboard holes... but I find 2 rows to be a more convenient size.

Step 5: Switches

Sometimes it's useful to have a small switch rather than a push-to-make button. Most switches will not fit into a breadboard. A DIP switch array fits nicely and also happens to have 0.3" by 0.1" spacing. Super!

Step 6: Pullup Resistors

Anyone messing with electronics will be familiar with pullup/down resistors. It wasn't so bad in the good old days when 1/4 watt resistors had nice sturdy leads on them. Due to the increased demand for copper, these parts are now made with skinny leads that don't hold up to repeated use as well as they used to.

These pullup resistors are made the same way as the LED's and will last indefinitely.

It's also nice to have some 10k bussed network resistors on hand, for when you need to pullup an entire row of IC pins or buttons!

Step 7: For My Fellow PIC-heads: Breadboard With Built in ICSP

Microcontrollers are being incorporated in a growing number of DIY projects. During the development process, a chip may have to be reprogrammed many times.

I don't know if the same thing applies to AVR's, but most every 8 and 14-pin PIC (as well as many of the 20 pin ones) share the same pinout for the programming lines. So I have dedicated a breadboard just for development of these PIC's.

The technique here is the same as that used to connect the power/ground buses. After peeling away some of the backing, you can permanently wire your programming connections and port them out to a standard header. You can also connect your power and ground pins to the appropriate rails and add a chip capacitor while you're in there.

You'll also notice some extra circuitry next to the programming header. Well, the same pins that are used for ICSP can also be used by the micro as normal input/output pins or other functions. If you are using those pins in your project, then you may very well have to connect/disconnect your programming cable each and every time you change and update your code. I have found, for instance, that the PICKit2 programmer holds the programming lines low when the programmer is inactive. Rather than put up with this, I have connected the data and clock lines through signal relays which are only closed when the programmer supplies power to the Vdd rail. The power goes through a rectifier diode so that when only external power is used the relays remain open. The HVP line doesn't get a relay to itself. Instead it is simply diode rectified, so that when it is not active it does not pull the MCLR line low. There is also a programming button at the top left of the board. This simple Instructable shows how I did that: https://www.instructables.com/id/PICKIT2-programming-button-mod/

*Edit: Since publishing this, I've been informed and have also personally confirmed that the Vpp line on a PICKit2 becomes high impedance when inactive, so it does not actually need to be diode-rectified for circuit-isolation; all I have achieved is to remove the ability of the programmer to do a hardware reset of the MCLR line (which hasn't bothered me so far). Oh, well.. I needed a jumper for my pcb, anyway, and the diode was the perfect size. :P

**update: wow, that method of clock/data isolation is sooo last year. Check out the latest pic.

Step 8: ICSP Hat

For non-standard pinouts, a simpler solution may be more desirable. Here's a simple programming "hat." It has 0.5" spacing, so it slips over a standard narrow DIP IC. It's point-to-point wired, then covered with sculpting epoxy. You can leave it in the breadboard, if you don't mind giving up the extra space. Then just plug the programming cable when necessary.

Step 9: The End

Well, that's it. If you have any tips you can share, I'd like to see them!

Comments

[Lee73]

Genius. I especially like the LED/resistor boards, I'm going to knock up some of these, and kick myself for not thinking of this before! I have soldered resistors to an LED leg in the past for similar space saving reasons, but this always looks pretty shifty, your solution is great - you could market this....

[Gentleheart]

Nicely written and very useful tips. Thanx for taking time off for this from your gps-guided laser cutter. This may aid in building my time-inverted quantum displacement chamber. :-)

[Gentleheart]

Here are some tinkertoys I have made in the past to reduce breadboard space.

[tiger12506]

I thought this was going to be click-bait bs when I clicked on it while bored. Boy was I WRONG. Wow! These are really clever and super useful! I'll be implementing a bunch of them as soon as I get the chance. I've done the LEDs before, I don't know why I never thought of the buttons, or the PIC programming mods!!! I like the way you think!

[jwhitten]

Bloody brilliant! Kudos to you.

[spectatorst]

Is this a time machine?

[klk149]

Hi klee27x, have you worked with MOSFETs or solid state relays? I have a few questions to ask you if you have the time.

[fritsie123]

Those little PCB's for your bread board are commonly called "BreadOut" boards. For some other examples see: http://www.startronics.nl/?page_id=39

Nice job on the InCircuit Programmer, by the way!

[TheZuke!]

The weblink is now longer valid.

[PKM]

Are the ones for inputs call InBread? /terrible pun Every time I see a project like this it makes me want to get my own breadboard/IC stuff and start hacking on electronics. Maybe a trip to Maplin is in order while it's still winter...

[dreadengineer]

I recommend frys.com for breadboards; they have one for $6 that is about half the size of the one in this instructable, and they can lock together to make bigger sizes. They're cheap enough that I usually just leave projects on them instead of transferring to a soldered breadboard. Here's a link to it:
http://shop3.frys.com/product/4612388;jsessionid=CVZB6s0oXjB6nv7dFdydxg**.node3?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

[klee27x]

Yeah, I have one project that is permanently breadboarded. It covers an entire double breadboard, and I just don't want to redo it! For anything much smaller I usually like to solder something together. And by "like" I mean I actually enjoy soldering, for what it's worth.

If you go through a lot of these, you might wanna try these guys:
http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=4443+TE.

I just love this company. The customer service is excellent.

[DavidRobertson]

Just out of curiosity, what is your residential solderless-breadboard project?

[klee27x]

um, for some reason the link doesn't work. Enter "breadboard" into the search engine and you'll find it. Same thing for $4.95, as of 2/8/09. $3.95 per for 10 or more.

[The Green Gentleman]

I am totally envious of your soldering skills.

[klee27x]

When your fingers become immune to soldering burns, you can do a lot of impossible stuff. :) It is also immensely helpful to have the right tools.

1. Lead solder

2. Use acid flux where you need to. Zinc chloride plumbers flux. It must be washed thoroughly, because it's conductive and corrosive. But when you can't get the connections you want any other way, there's nothing to lose, is there?

3. Get yourself a fiberglass scratch brush for cleaning contacts/pads.

4. Pair of locking surgical forceps for holding things

5. Tweezers

6. Good lighting!

[TheZuke!]

Corrosive is right! Decades ago I saw a VOM kit that had been assembled with acid core solder. Every trace on the PCB was green with corrosion!

[lewis.powell2]

i'd like to see a good way of connectung POTs to the breadboard. I'm starting to play around with guitar pedals, and i've managed to make something similar to the BEAVIS board, but having different POTs for each project, i dont want to have to hook wires around them every time and have them hanging off the board.

[WilminC]

That circuit looks beautiful, I like how you cut your wires. The 5eBoard is a better solder-less solution for prototyping. You can place components anywhere you like kind of like Lego. Much neater and organized. Google "5eBoard."

[aamonster]

Nice tips.

About LED boards: I think it's a good idea to solder two LEDs (e.g. red and green) in opposite direction (so if you put them between 2 microcontroller pins you do not need extra line to ground). I'm going to make a few of such microboards for experiments with FPGA board (it have 2-rows pin headers - so it's easy to connect such a microboards with 2-pin female header without using breadboard and wires)