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Talking Electronics has been designing circuits for over 30 years and has used many different type of experimental boards. Some are expensive while others are not suitable for designing a circuit. The components are not easily removed. The simplest and best board is the solderless breadboard but it does not allow some components to be fitted. If the leads are too thick or too thin, they do not go down the holes in the board. Sometimes you want to keep the project and this means you have to transfer the components to a new board and re-build the circuit. We are designing projects every day and would have hundreds of breadboards if we decided to use this expensive approach. A better choice is to use an "experimental board" where the components are soldered to the top of the board. Instead of the tracks being on the bottom of the board, it is turned over and the solder-lands are on the top. This type of experimental board is much cheaper than any other and the project can be kept as a working-design, after it is completed. We have hundreds of projects in this form. Once the project works we design a printed circuit board and then release is as a project. You can see the experimental board in the photo and we have two types: The small version and large version. These boards are ideal for microcontroller projects. Many of the projects use the same layout for the chip, positive and negative supply and In-Circuit Programming pins. All that is required is a few surrounding components and a project is produced. With the parts soldered to the top of the board, it is much easier to change any of the values during the experimental stages. You don't have to pull the component off the board and you don't have to turn the board over. It's much faster and more convenient. If you think a project will work without testing, modifying and altering things, you are kidding yourself. It sometimes takes hundreds of changes to get a project working perfectly. And if the components are not easy to change, you may be reluctant to do the finer adjusting. That's why a prototyping board must be designed for easy access and must be universal, so that all types of components can be fitted. The whole concept behind DESIGNING WITH A PIC MICRO is to be able to produce a project without having to buy individual chip. The cost of postage can make a project uneconomical and waiting for the parts to arrive may take a few days. By having a PIC micro and an assortment of standard components, you are able to design and put-together a project in a few days. Here are the two Prototyping boards for this range of projects:
The next
chapter in this tutorial is: In Circuit Programming.
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28-5-2013 |
