Skip to content

Build it on a perfboard

After this step you have the plan of your circuit on a perfboard, checked against the circuit, and the lists to solder it from.

State

Built and checked offline; no prototype has been soldered from such a plan yet.

A prototype comes after Draw and hand over, before a board or instead of one. No EDA program takes part.

What you do

Say that you build the board by hand on a perfboard, and which kind: a pad per hole, or a pad over three holes. The board becomes a hand-wired board. Its parts must be through-hole, so a circuit in SMD first gets through-hole parts.

Claude writes the perfboard plan: each part on the grid, bare wire below, insulated wires on top. edakit holds it to the circuit and draws both sides:

$ edakit perfboard
main: Lochraster, a pad per hole, 14 × 15 holes, 4 parts, 2 wires, 7 bridges
  note     PERF.grid/bent   SW1: leads bent by 0.63 mm into the 2.54 mm grid (allowed 0.8 mm)
  …
  0 errors; -> build/edakit/perfboard/main/top.svg, build/edakit/perfboard/main/bottom.svg, build/edakit/perfboard/main/cut.svg, build/edakit/perfboard/main/build.md

The walkthrough's circuit with through-hole parts on a perfboard, top view, drawn by edakit perfboard

The same board's bottom side, seen through the board from above

The walkthrough's example as a prototype: its plan and parts.

What you are asked

What the plan must keep, as for a board: the parts you touch or look at, the size of the piece you cut. Claude fixes every error itself and runs the check again.

What you decide

Whether the drawings read right before you solder. The reviewer pcb-reviewer reads the plan as it reads a board, for the check M-5 of Have it reviewed.

What you have

Three drawings and build.md's four lists. First the example's cut list. The insulated wires on top:

Colour Length Holes Net Strip
red 41 mm A2–C10 VBAT 5 mm at A2, 5 mm at C10
black 52 mm J1–N10 GND 5 mm at J1, 8 mm at N10

Each stripped end goes through its hole onto the pad beside it, black's at N10 on along L10 … N10. No bare wire: R1's lead in F4 and D1's anode lead in J3 bend over to E4 and J4.

cut.svg draws it at 1:1: printed at 100 %, lay each piece on its row.

The cut list, 1:1

The build list goes from low parts to high. The test list says what the multimeter must read, and the material list what to buy. edakit gate checks the plan as the layout, without EasyEDA.

Then you solder and test. A board from the same circuit: Have it reviewed.

Read on