How to Colonize an Asteroid
If you are trying to build a circuit
which has more than a couple of components, it rapidly becomes too complicated
and messy to just hook a bunch of parts together, you need a way to organize
and mount them. In addition, you don't want to solder things together if
you don't know wether they will work or not.
The term "breadboarding" comes from the early days of electronics when components were mostly homemade and very large. Experimenters would construct their projects on an old breadboard, often with terminals permanently mounted so that circuits could be built and the disassembled with ease. Components now are much smaller, and technology has provided us with several products to make life easier when constructing our prototypes and testing new circuits.
Most of the
prototyping breadboards available on the market today are very similar to
each other. They consist of a plastic block full of a pattern of holes, and
the holes are electrically connected in such a way as to allow you to build
the most common types of circuits with a minimum of effort. There is usually
a center channel, wide enough for a standard integrated circuit to straddle,
with five holes out from each side. These five holes are electrically connected
in a line out from the center, which allows you to simply plug in other
components or jumper wires. On the outside edges, there is usually a "bus"
strip which runs down each side. This is normally used to connect the power
and ground wires to the circuit. If you buy your breadboards all from the
same manufacturer, they usually have an interlocking tab on the edges to
allow you to connect many individual breadboards together.
Another product sold by many companies is a box of pre-cut jumper wires for connecting your circuits. It can sometimes take hundreds of individual jumper wires to connect a given circuit, and it sure saves a lot of time and effort to use the pre-cut jumpers.
© 1998, Robert Lyon Richards