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Board design help! Some buttons and led on a perfboard

stenhurkmans

Jun 13, 2017
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I have a project with school, we must create a jumping robot and for the electronics we chose a arduino pro mini with some leds, buttons, potentiometers and a buzzer. We want to drive a 12v motor with a mosfet. Now we have created the circuit on a breadboard, but now we want it on a perforated board (18x24 matrix). I've tried a few times in fritzing a design but I lack the experience to create a nice looking board. Can anyone help me? or just give me a few tips to get going?

A few sidenotes: the mosfet is lose of the board with the motor and diode for easy replacement, the power is stepped down from 12v to 5v by a dc-to-dc converter so we dont risk to blow it up since the pro mini can only accept up to 12v and the battery is 12.8v fully charged.

Here is the scematic on breadboard: (we will use a arduino pro mini 5v)WhatsApp Image 2017-06-12 at 15.04.33.jpeg

perfboard.PNG

Greetings and many thanks!
Sten Hurkmans
 

Dennis Tan

Jun 29, 2017
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I think your task is to use programmable SCM to work out your robot,right? Why not buy the whole kits(including all components) from alibaba/ebay, after that your left work is to program the chip.
 

Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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I use Vero perforated-stripboard for all my circuits. The strips are cut to length with a drill bit and form half of the wiring of a pcb and the parts and a few short jumper wires form the other half. It looks so good that all of my prototypes were sold as the final product where only a few were needed. Some were extremely complicated and still looked good.
 

Dennis Tan

Jun 29, 2017
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I use Vero perforated-stripboard for all my circuits. The strips are cut to length with a drill bit and form half of the wiring of a pcb and the parts and a few short jumper wires form the other half. It looks so good that all of my prototypes were sold as the final product where only a few were needed. Some were extremely complicated and still looked good.
better not to use jumper wires,it's not helpful to deal with delicate one.
 

Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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My bare jumper wires are almost always at right angles to the copper strips and are soldered on the component side from one strip to a nearby strip. Here is my layout and a photo. Each red X is where a strip was cut:
 

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Minder

Apr 24, 2015
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There is also a couple of S/W programs dedicated to Vero board layout and design.
M.
 

BobK

Jan 5, 2010
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Audioguru,

About how long would it take you to design and make the board shown in post #6? Just wanted to compare to what it would take me to do a PCB at that level of complexity.

Bob
 

Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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Audioguru,

About how long would it take you to design and make the board shown in post #6? Just wanted to compare to what it would take me to do a PCB at that level of complexity.

Bob
About an hour or two.
 

kellys_eye

Jun 25, 2010
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You can purchase PCBs that have a copper layout identical to that of the stripboard therefore all you need do is transfer the design from one to the other. 'Delete' all the inbetween strips that aren't used to reduce the physical length of the board.

Here's one I found on eBay that's workable although there are other suppliers that do 'exact' boards to match

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/13x5-cm-P...186593?hash=item4d5dae4fe1:g:lIYAAOSwTM5Y1Ey8
 
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Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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When my local supplier ran out of real UK-made Veroboard, I bought some stripboards that were made in China. Its base was not blue epoxy-fiberglass, instead it looked like and smelled like animal dung and was warped. The chewing gum they used to glue on the "copper?" strips did not do a good job. It was difficult to solder. Never again!

All my stripboard layouts are compact with no unused strips. Each soldered hole has only one connection in it.
 

kellys_eye

Jun 25, 2010
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You get what you pay for.

epoxy boards are the best (for general amateur work) and the stuff you had (failed) was probably SRPB (synthetic resin bonded paper) that is ok for many low frequency circuits but varies a lot in quality.

The key to look for is the centrally placed drilled holes - if the manufacturer has taken enough care to ensure the holes are properly centred then you can be assured they took equal pains to ensure the paper-based material (and the glue for the tracks) was similarly specc'd.

But given the extremely low cost of such boards (when purchased direct from China) it's worth the risk to get some just for 'knocking out' a circuit or two.
 

Audioguru

Sep 24, 2016
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Perf boards from Radio Shack were also very poor quality and their holes were too big.
 

BobK

Jan 5, 2010
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About an hour or two.
So, I would say 3 hours for me to make PCB that size and complexity. Though I am moving towards SMT, which is faster due to much less drilling.

Bob
 
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