Stripboard

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A piece of unused stripboard cooker hood filters

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Stripboard (usually known by the trademark name Veroboard of the British Vero Electronics company, who invented it) is a widely-used type of electronics prototyping board characterized by a 0.1 inch (2.54 mm) regular (rectangular) grid of holes, with wide parallel strips of copper cladding running in one direction all the way across one side of the board. In using the board, breaks are made in the tracks, usually around holes, to divide the strips into multiple electrical nodes. With care, it is possible to break between holes to allow for components that have two pin rows only one position apart such as twin row headers for IDCs.

Stripboard is available from many different vendors. Their products have in common that they are made using printed circuit board techniques generally with synthetic-resin-bonded paper (SRBP) as the base board type. The 0.1 inch (2.54 mm) spacing allows sockets for DIP ICs (or the ICs directly), some standard types of connector, and other devices with pins on a 0.1 inch spacing to be directly mounted without any gap between them and the board. The components are usually placed on the plain side of the board, with their leads protruding through the holes. The leads are then soldered to the copper tracks on the other side of the board to make the desired connections, and any excess wire is cut off. The continuous tracks may be easily and neatly cut as desired to form breaks between conductors using a 5 mm twist drill, a hand cutter made for the purpose, or a knife. Tracks may be linked up on either side of the board using either insulated or uninsulated lengths of wire (though, if using uninsulated wire on the back, care is needed to avoid short circuits). With practice, very neat and reliable assemblies can be created, though such a method is labour-intensive and therefore unsuitable for production assemblies except in very small quantity.

An example of a used stripboard

External wire connections to the board are made either by soldering the wires through the holes or, for wires too thick to pass through the holes, by soldering them to specially made pins called Veropins which fit tightly into the holes. Alternatively, some types of connectors have a suitable pin spacing to be inserted directly into the board.

Stripboards have evolved over time into several variants and related products. For example, a larger version using a 0.15 inch (3.81 mm) grid and larger holes is available, but is generally less popular (presumably because it doesn't match up with standard IC pin spacing). Stripboard is not designed for surface-mount components. For high density prototyping, especially of digital circuits, wire wrap is faster and more reliable than Stripboard for experienced personnel.

Veroboard is similar in concept and usage to breadboard, but is cheaper and more permanentonnections are soldered and while some limited reuse may be possible, more than a few cycles of soldering and desoldering are likely to render both the components and the board unusable. In contrast, breadboard connections are held by friction, and the breadboard can be reused many times. However, a breadboard is not very suitable for prototyping that needs to remain in a set configuration for an appreciable period of time nor for physical mock-ups containing a working circuit or for any environment subject to vibration or movement.

A related product is called perfboard (short for perforated board). This is like a Veroboard but without the copper strips and is also used for electrical prototyping, generally with techniques such as wire wrapping or a wiring pencil.

TriPad stripboard has strips of copper broken up into three-hole sections

Stripboards have further evolved into a larger class of prototype boards, available in different shapes and sizes, with different conductive trace layouts. For example, one variant is called a TriPad board. This is similar to stripboard, except that the conductive tracks do not run continuously along the board but are broken into sections, each of which spans three holes. This allows the legs of two or three components to be easily linked together in the circuit conveniently without the need for track breaks to be made. However, in order to link more than three holes together, wire links or bridges must be formed and this can result in a less compact layout than is possible with ordinary stripboard.

Other prototype board variants have generic layouts to simplify building prototypes with integrated circuits, typically in DIL shapes, or with transistors (pads forming triangles). In particular, some boards mimic the layout of breadboards, to simplify moving a non-permanent prototype on a breadboard to a permanent construction on a PCB. Some types of boards have layouts to easily add periphery connectors, like DB9 or IDCC headers. Some come in special physical shapes, to be used to prototype plug-in boards for computer bus systems.

References

^ Bilotta, Anthony J.: Connections in Electronic Assemblies. Marcel Dekker: 1985. ISBN 0824773195

See also

Point-to-point construction

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