alt Hacker NewsI truly do not understand the appeal of proto board. Certainly tastes are individual and like any skill worth practicing, you do get better at it... but it's just such a miserable way to work. IMO, again.
Not only can you now order a real PCB for under $10, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could just buy extremely large pre-cut wire kits and treat them as the consumables that they truly are.
I'd rather go back to wire-wrapping. Every time I think "this is a great opportunity to use up a proto board!" I end up covered in flux goo and wondering what on earth I was thinking.
The real problem with proto board is what happens when you inevitably need to change your circuit. Again, it's miserable and suddenly your perceived speed gains are simply gone.
I think that the most exciting thing in prototyping right now is Stephen Hawes experiments with a) creating a PCB with premade vias that can be used to prototype anything and b) using a fiber laser to make your own PCBs.
Truly one of the most inspiring creators today.
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Yes, wire-wrapping is/was so great. Really good quality connections, no accidental connections due to solder ending up at the wrong places, easy to remove or change.
And no solder-iron that risks burning stuff. And no smoke either.
The only draw-back is that it seems to be so expensive and almost non-existant today.
If you want to play around now and with little preparation, there's no beating proto-boards. No toying around with designing the PCB, no waiting for the order. They're also great to practice your soldering skills.
Sometimes you just want a sandwich, not to bake bread
Any recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?
While I agree with you about protoboards (especially the non-strip kind, which seem to be the predominant ones nowadays), I feel like, for anything but the most trivial circuit, drawing the schematic in CAD, picking footprints, laying out a board, doing paper printouts for verification and sending it off to a manufacturer is easily a full working day or more. It also runs the risk of scope creep -- your quick and dirty prototype suddenly turns into "a product" and you start thinking about form factor and enclosures and extra features.
And over a week later when your minimum order quantity arrives, you discover your mistake and can add five more boards to the junk pile...
UV laser exposure feels like the correct way to go about doing small scale prototyping imho.