Breadboards come in the form of rectangular boxes perforated with holes used to mount electrical projects. These perforated holes on breadboards are commonly referred to as nodes. They are used to insert wires or electronic pieces through them to complete electrical circuits. It is easy to mount your electrical project on a breadboard.
Breadboards are readily available and inexpensive for you to use on your PCB design. There are different kinds of breadboards such as the Tie Point Mini Self –Adhesive Solderless Breadboard and Velleman SD 35n Solderless Breadboard. These range from simple breadboards to complex ones depending on your kind of project.
In this article, we’ll cover some basics about breadboards, especially the pros and cons of those:
Advantages
The Advantages of designing with breadboards are discussed as follows:
1. It is adjustable
Every designer should try out a PCB design on a breadboard because it is easy to adjust a breadboard in case you realize that there may be a bug within the system of your design. Debugging a rock solid design may be hard but by using a breadboard, adjustable jumper leads makes it for you to debug your design. You therefore end up spending less since you don’t not have to replace the entire expensive electronic equipment.
2. It acts as a shield
A breadboard ensures that your design remains intact by acting as a shield in case it suffers an accident, therefore holding your circuit firmly for it not to get destroyed before reaching its target destination. It is strong enough for it to hold your project in place.
3. It is flexible
A breadboard is flexible in that you can reuse it by playing with connections to create temporary prototypes. The nodes on the breadboards is what makes it easy to use again. This gives you an opportunity to experiment with circuit designs making you feel less limited on only one option since they do not require soldering.
4. Makes it easy for testing
The nodes in a breadboard make it easy for you to test your connection. You can thus easily create circuits by removing and placing wires on different nodes while testing if the components are effective on certain nodes or not. It gives you a chance to rearrange the wires until you are finally satisfied with what you intend to achieve.
Despite the fact that it is easy for you to get a breadboard at an affordable price, it may not work efficiently under certain circumstances.
Disadvantages
Disadvantages of designing with breadboards are as follows:
1. Not suitable for designing circuits with high voltage
The board connection does not work well with high voltage applications. Commonly, PCB applications work with low voltages but in areas of 48 Volts and above, your breadboard might limit you forcing you to look for other alternatives. They are therefore not efficient for complex experiments.
2. Not good for high current applications
High current applications too may not suit your breadboard. Your design will not work well when dealing with 20mA’s and above.
3. High Resistance
The breadboard is made up of strips that carry high resistance that interfere with the signal integrity of the spectrum making high frequency not travel through the board. You can therefore not use your breadboard to send 10MHz analog signals and above.