Breadboarding birds nest
Breadboarding birds nest
(OP)
My Arduino projects invariably end up as a horrible mess reminiscent of the Bride of Frankenstein's hair. What I need is some sort of plastic building block kit that I can screw all the PCBs, power supplies and other components to. It would need standoffs and spacers and bulkheads as well. Ideally the thing would also come with a plastic box so that I can seal the whole lot against battery acid fumes and ants, spiders and wasps.
Is there such a thing? What is it called?
Is there such a thing? What is it called?
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?





RE: Breadboarding birds nest
On the mechanical side, my friend Larry Williams was an artiste in aluminum sheet. Wave your hands in the air to tell him where you wanted a valve or switch mounted, come back in ten minutes, and your stuff would be positioned in space where you wanted it, supported by the ugliest piece(s) of metal you have ever seen, no drawings required.
If you had time to wait a bit, our lab stocked assortments of standoffs of all sexes, and little angle brackets, mostly designs left over from vacuum tube radio days. You still needed a drill and a few bits and maybe a few Bud Boxes if your project had a budget for it.
Every few years, somebody comes out with a modular packaging scheme, like folded Bud Boxes, or more recently extruded aluminum boxes, or still more recently, plastic boxes, the latter two with either built in standoffs or paired ribs made to accept slide-in PC boards. Electronic distributors stock them for a while, until their initial inventory gets depleted, which I think takes much longer than any merchant would want, then somebody comes out with a newer, more revolutionary system, and the cycle continues.
More recently, there's been noticeable activity in using 3D printers to build custom enclosures for prototypes, many of which are very clever. ... so much so that there may not be another generation of semi-custom enclosures. The 3D printed stuff can get pretty close to a usable enclosure/structure with no drilling or other postprocessing required, beyond a little Bondo and paint to make the exterior surfaces look nice.
I thought Arduinos were originally designed to not need much custom hardware, with 'all you could possibly want' provided by stacking 'shields' or some such. ... but they sort of wandered away from that concedpt by offering different models with different envelopes, and every 'sorta Arduino' having its own unique geometry, etc.
A search on Arduino accessories produced quite a lot of offers, including some that should be available on your side of the globe.
Search also on 'box for Arduino'.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
It would really depend on what you're doing with all the IO and field wiring for your specific application as to what else might be suitable for production. DIN rail terminals are good, but expensive for hobbyist one offs. Other more permanent options include using PCB standoffs and screws from Jaycar, and just mount them in those ABS plastic boxes that Dick Smith Electronics made so popular.
EDMS Australia
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Mike, oh well at least I was right to be puzzled by the absence of them in the shops. I think you've just suggested the best route, 3d printing.
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
They are great, from DC all the way up to ... audio frequencies.
But almost nothing runs that slow anymore, including microcontrollers and Arduinos.
The problem is the parallel sub-buses that do the interconnect, which talk to each other at what are now modestly high frequencies.
Next step up requires soldering; push-in anchors (I think they're called 'flea clips' in perfboard, with solid wire interconnects, but the best perfboard for the clips won't accept DIP packages, so you glue them on with the legs sticking up. Or fine pitch perfboard with DIP packages soldered in, and wire wrap wire, one turn and solder. That's sort of state of the art from 20 years ago, like you find in old Circuit Cellar articles.
(
Years before that, when solder turrets on phenolic boards were state of the art, my then employer got one of the first Gerber photo-plotters and started making a 'semicustom mask' with an array of transistor patterns, to generate proto circuits to be soldered together as needed. I remember a scream coming from the photoplotter room, when somebody going through the enormously boring task of positioning little master masks one at a time on photosensitive material and flashing through them one by one, sort of drifted off toward the end of one very large board and screwed up 24 hours' work by placing the mask wrong or placing the wrong mask. That's why Gerber files look like they do; they tell the production machine which mask to use, where to put it, and how to orient it. The files were generated manually in those days, because nobody had computers to do it.
)
Now all the circuit pioneers just design custom circuit boards and have them shipped in a day or two, or use sub-boards like Arduinos. ... and they hand-solder surface mount packages. You can identify them by the burns on their fingertips.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
They have a distributor in Queenstown.
Don't bother cleaning up the bird's nest. Just HIDE it.
STF
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Dan - Owner
http://www.Hi-TecDesigns.com
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
https://www.allelectronics.com/category/490/projec...
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
What's it do?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
STF
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
Cheers
Greg Locock
New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
One trick I've seen used is to buy ribbon cable (esp. the multi-colored stuff), cut lengths of it and split pairs/singles off the harness to route to other components. Even if it's a rat snarl of wiring, the look of it coming back to a single bundle in some spot or another makes it look much better (dare we say professional?).
I like the 2x4 and plywood panel layout though. Waterproof that with a few wraps of Saran and good to go, no?
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
... but thanks to a long period of inactivity on the home front (working out of state and then not working but summering in another state), most of my stock is probably too old to be solderable.
... and I'm under intense pressure to 'get rid of all that junk'.
... Where the word 'junk' is defined as anything she doesn't recognize or know the function of, and especially anything that looks like it might be part of a computer.
But your breadboard deserves a slightly better housing, e.g. in addition to the plywood backing, screwed to the wall, a coupla short vertical 1x2s on the vertical edges to hold a piece of smoked plastic to act as a front panel/ display holder. I might leave the top and bottom open for ventilation, with maybe a horizontal shelf spaced above the top opening to keep things from dropping on the electronics.
(
We have lizards ((green and/or brown anoles, I think) who like to do push-ups on the ceiling, and they're not housebroken. Nor are their primary prey, cockroaches, big ones, which is why we don't molest the lizards.
)
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Breadboarding birds nest
I can't imagine getting used to lizards!
I live 500 miles north of cockroach habitat, and would gladly move 500 miles further north if global warming expands their territory.
STF