I 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.
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.
Burning stuff isn't a problem when soldering. It sounds like you need a little equipment upgrade. Get a holder for your soldering iron, and a fume extractor (filtered fan).
I wasn't mainly thinking about the actual soldering process, although that can also be an issue with small components or when not focusing on where the iron touches while reading a schwematic. But more like when the solder iron is stuffed back in the holder and something else gets pushed against it or when I get stuck in the solder iron's power cable and the solder iron is pulled out of its holder. I guess with more space, less junk on the table and the power cable fixed somewhere would help, but still, it's an annoyance.
I would prefer holding a wire-wrapping pistol than an iron.
I'm just surprised that my blog post from almost 6 years ago suddenly made it to the HN front page...
That said: only when I need it the same day and it's not too complicated will I use protoboard. Otherwise it's JLCPCB every time, even if it's just a small debug interface board. I recently bought a cheap wire-wrapping tool and that's so much faster than messing around with enamel wire.
The board that is featured in this blog post was the first prototype of a skunkworks design for work that was on the shelves of Best Buy 7 months later. It was started just a week or two before COVID shutdown. I created PCBs soon after. Another month or 2 later and you'd have had a really hard time getting any PCB out of JLCPCB due to the supply chain disruption.
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.
Yeah! What is the deal with the shift to non-strip protoboards? If you're going to work like that, why on earth wouldn't you want to at least start with the assumption that you're going to need to connect things?
The thing that really gets me is when I see designs on non-strip protos that involve the creator drawing a bead of solder across multiple holes to form a really unreliable wire. It's like they spent time using red stone in Minecraft and brought that instinct to electronics.
As for your larger point... I hear you - especially on the scope creep. However, it's distinctly possible that there's a realistic minimum time commitment to certain things we want to accomplish in life that are worth doing. If I have an idea for a little amp circuit or something, maybe the right thing to do is to make my best effort in KiCAD, spend that afternoon, measure everything twice... then not think about it for a week. Maybe that's when you jump into Fusion and whip up that quick enclosure.
Maybe the antidote to "slop" is that anything worth doing is worth that bit of attention. A product for one customer.
Otherwise, the solution is likely still the trusty and small drama solderless breadboard.
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
Depending on the complexity/situation/mood/need for permanence I use some combination of double-headed (male) jumper wire and pre-cut breadboard wires. I buy my jumper wire as tear-off ribbons because sometimes I need 14 in a row for a GPIO bank or similar.
Jumper wires are the fastest and easiest to work with, but as complexity grows things quickly get out of hand visually and spatially.
Pre-cut wires are great, though I have some hot takes. First, for a long time I would carefully remove them from previous projects for reuse. I now believe that this is objectively bad because they grow brittle and become harder to re-insert. Instead, think of them like sandpaper, which has an obvious point of diminishing return. Throw them away as you use them up and order more when you're running low.
My main beef with pre-cut wires is that for reasons that anger me every time I think about it, they all come in lengths that increment by one 2.54mm unit up until about 10 lengths, at which point they start jumping to arbitrary lengths. So you end up either a) using two wires to cover a distance or b) with an overly long wire that you need to manage.
> I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board.
I didn't understand your comment until I looked at the pictures in the article. To me "proto board" has always meant wire-wrapping. I lost count of how many of my designs back in the dark ages started as wire-wrapped protoboards. CPU cards, drive controllers, memory cards, motor drivers, keypads, I/O cards and myriad other projects.
In fact, I still have my OK Industries wire-wrapping gun[0]. I still have pins, sockets, boards, wire, etc. I probably reach for them once every couple of years these days. On those rare occasions when it's the middle of the night or a weekend and I have to wire-up a small board (nothing substantial). It's fast and works well for the right kind of project.
The problem with wire-wrap (and breadboards) is that, once clock frequencies (or frequencies in general in analog designs) rise the capacitive and inductive effects quickly conspire against you and make it impossible to build circuits that work. This is where the OP's approach can provide a bit of a bridge between a full PCB and wire-wrap/breadboard. I have done hand-wired (just like the article) boards with twisted pairs and carefully routed point-to-point connections. I never used magnet wire, just kynar or teflon wire-wrap wire.
[0] Mine is exactly like the one in figure 4 in this article. It works with spools of wire and auto-strips as you wire a board. It is very fast. Not sure why the article shows pre-stripped wire, the tool does the work for you auto-magically. I didn't read the article, maybe they are using a bit that does not strip (why?).
I used to work for Schenectady Chemicals in 1968 we developed solderable self fluxing polyurethane coated enamelled wire, it was an immediate hit and soldered well. Times have changed and I left them in 1978, but it might be an item to look for as I found it very handy.
Indeed, by rights that shouldn't work. But it does and he threw in an ISA bus just for the heck of it and that works too. And all of this at a very respectable clock speed. Mad props.
Anything with latches above 10 MHz is pretty hard to get to run stable when using wirewrap. The Cray-1 was at its time absolute state-of-the-art. Replicating something like a 486 motherboard, which already had a whole raft of timing tricks to make sure that it all stayed synchronized is really not that easy.
I've spent more than one evening baffled by stuff that should have been trivial at clock speeds a lot lower than that. A 33 MHz clock has a cycle time of 1/33000000 = 33 nano seconds. But the rise time of that clock is much, much shorter, on the order of a few ns. At that sort of slew rate anything becomes an antenna. The backplane of the Cray-1 was set up as transmission lines with two spiral wound wires for each signal, cut exactly to size to make sure the signal arrived at the right moment, and without the bulk of the signal leaking away.
On this circuit board things are - let's put it friendly - a bit less organized than that. So by rights this really shouldn't have worked, the fact that it does absolutely amazes and inspires me.
One thing I like for prototyping with through hole parts is Verowire pen which kind of combines wire wrap with soldering. It uses thin wire in self-fluxing insulation. You can use the pen to wrap a bunch of components that go in series without wasting time for trimming the wire to length. Then you solder over the wraps and bite off the runs that shouldn't be there (e.g. when you wired a diode you remove the wire between its contacts).
> ... regular wires with plastic isolation, but those can be a pain to strip, even with a semi-decent stripping tool.
> Boil away a millimeter or 2 of enamel without cutting the wire off the spool.
The person spends 18 seconds (see the video) to "boil away" and tin the tip of the enamel wire, yet complains about using a wire stripper to strip the wire in 5 seconds.
I mostly use breadboards even with microcontroller stuff (at 16 MHz, or so), and never run into any problems for constructing semi-permanent circuits. The PCB version of breadboards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/571) also work pretty well. There area also little PCB adaptors to integrate surface-mount components on breadboards that work well.
This is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
Might be a dumb question, but isn’t the risk of cold joints proportional to your skill in soldering in general? Important context: I am definitely a noob to soldering
It is, yes. After some practice, you will not get cold joints. Or when there is a danger of a cold joint due to massive heat sinking around, you will know and be extra careful
Go carefully there. Kynar tends to wilt at soldering heat. Press insulated wires together when they're still hot and suddenly they can be kissing; a 1-diameter short is easy to overlook when you're inspecting your work.
I find it worthwhile to use teflon-insulated wire here. When I'm building a prototype, the last thing I want to have to distrust is my construction.
I 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.
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.
Burning stuff isn't a problem when soldering. It sounds like you need a little equipment upgrade. Get a holder for your soldering iron, and a fume extractor (filtered fan).
I wasn't mainly thinking about the actual soldering process, although that can also be an issue with small components or when not focusing on where the iron touches while reading a schwematic. But more like when the solder iron is stuffed back in the holder and something else gets pushed against it or when I get stuck in the solder iron's power cable and the solder iron is pulled out of its holder. I guess with more space, less junk on the table and the power cable fixed somewhere would help, but still, it's an annoyance.
I would prefer holding a wire-wrapping pistol than an iron.
I'm just surprised that my blog post from almost 6 years ago suddenly made it to the HN front page...
That said: only when I need it the same day and it's not too complicated will I use protoboard. Otherwise it's JLCPCB every time, even if it's just a small debug interface board. I recently bought a cheap wire-wrapping tool and that's so much faster than messing around with enamel wire.
The board that is featured in this blog post was the first prototype of a skunkworks design for work that was on the shelves of Best Buy 7 months later. It was started just a week or two before COVID shutdown. I created PCBs soon after. Another month or 2 later and you'd have had a really hard time getting any PCB out of JLCPCB due to the supply chain disruption.
This is a blog post that I would love to read. Seriously.
Tell this story!
Maybe after I retire. :-)
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.
Yeah! What is the deal with the shift to non-strip protoboards? If you're going to work like that, why on earth wouldn't you want to at least start with the assumption that you're going to need to connect things?
The thing that really gets me is when I see designs on non-strip protos that involve the creator drawing a bead of solder across multiple holes to form a really unreliable wire. It's like they spent time using red stone in Minecraft and brought that instinct to electronics.
As for your larger point... I hear you - especially on the scope creep. However, it's distinctly possible that there's a realistic minimum time commitment to certain things we want to accomplish in life that are worth doing. If I have an idea for a little amp circuit or something, maybe the right thing to do is to make my best effort in KiCAD, spend that afternoon, measure everything twice... then not think about it for a week. Maybe that's when you jump into Fusion and whip up that quick enclosure.
Maybe the antidote to "slop" is that anything worth doing is worth that bit of attention. A product for one customer.
Otherwise, the solution is likely still the trusty and small drama solderless breadboard.
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
Solderless breadboards for playing around, aren't they?
It depends if your application can deal with the capacitance. Anything above ~10-30 MHz is an exercise in futility.
Wire-wrapping is awesome but proper sockets are expensive as hell. And changing a circuit on a real PCB is even more of a hell.
Any recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?
Yes, actually!
Depending on the complexity/situation/mood/need for permanence I use some combination of double-headed (male) jumper wire and pre-cut breadboard wires. I buy my jumper wire as tear-off ribbons because sometimes I need 14 in a row for a GPIO bank or similar.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005202872082.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003219096948.html
Jumper wires are the fastest and easiest to work with, but as complexity grows things quickly get out of hand visually and spatially.
Pre-cut wires are great, though I have some hot takes. First, for a long time I would carefully remove them from previous projects for reuse. I now believe that this is objectively bad because they grow brittle and become harder to re-insert. Instead, think of them like sandpaper, which has an obvious point of diminishing return. Throw them away as you use them up and order more when you're running low.
My main beef with pre-cut wires is that for reasons that anger me every time I think about it, they all come in lengths that increment by one 2.54mm unit up until about 10 lengths, at which point they start jumping to arbitrary lengths. So you end up either a) using two wires to cover a distance or b) with an overly long wire that you need to manage.
> I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board.
I didn't understand your comment until I looked at the pictures in the article. To me "proto board" has always meant wire-wrapping. I lost count of how many of my designs back in the dark ages started as wire-wrapped protoboards. CPU cards, drive controllers, memory cards, motor drivers, keypads, I/O cards and myriad other projects.
In fact, I still have my OK Industries wire-wrapping gun[0]. I still have pins, sockets, boards, wire, etc. I probably reach for them once every couple of years these days. On those rare occasions when it's the middle of the night or a weekend and I have to wire-up a small board (nothing substantial). It's fast and works well for the right kind of project.
The problem with wire-wrap (and breadboards) is that, once clock frequencies (or frequencies in general in analog designs) rise the capacitive and inductive effects quickly conspire against you and make it impossible to build circuits that work. This is where the OP's approach can provide a bit of a bridge between a full PCB and wire-wrap/breadboard. I have done hand-wired (just like the article) boards with twisted pairs and carefully routed point-to-point connections. I never used magnet wire, just kynar or teflon wire-wrap wire.
[0] Mine is exactly like the one in figure 4 in this article. It works with spools of wire and auto-strips as you wire a board. It is very fast. Not sure why the article shows pre-stripped wire, the tool does the work for you auto-magically. I didn't read the article, maybe they are using a bit that does not strip (why?).
https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/wire_wrap_is_aliv...
I'd recommend a spoon-style tip* instead of using a fresh drop of solder each time.
[*] like these https://www.jbctools.com/cartridges-category-4-design-Spoon-...
Looks kind of like a fountain pen for solder!
And works like one ;)
I used to work for Schenectady Chemicals in 1968 we developed solderable self fluxing polyurethane coated enamelled wire, it was an immediate hit and soldered well. Times have changed and I left them in 1978, but it might be an item to look for as I found it very handy.
Possibly vaguely similar product from a German manufacturer: https://www.sh-wire.de/en/applications/product-range/shsoldr...
I have a good example - Piotr Grzesik's prototype of 486 SBC recently covered on Hackaday https://hackaday.com/2026/01/08/m8sbc-86-is-an-fpga-based-ki... and HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46578601
https://imgur.com/gallery/486-homebrew-computer-lsUiWdw#dIBt...
Looks like something that shouldnt work at all :)
Indeed, by rights that shouldn't work. But it does and he threw in an ISA bus just for the heck of it and that works too. And all of this at a very respectable clock speed. Mad props.
I mean Cray-1 backplane was wire-wrapped, it definitely should have worked for 486.
Sure, it's easy ;) Try it.
Anything with latches above 10 MHz is pretty hard to get to run stable when using wirewrap. The Cray-1 was at its time absolute state-of-the-art. Replicating something like a 486 motherboard, which already had a whole raft of timing tricks to make sure that it all stayed synchronized is really not that easy.
I've spent more than one evening baffled by stuff that should have been trivial at clock speeds a lot lower than that. A 33 MHz clock has a cycle time of 1/33000000 = 33 nano seconds. But the rise time of that clock is much, much shorter, on the order of a few ns. At that sort of slew rate anything becomes an antenna. The backplane of the Cray-1 was set up as transmission lines with two spiral wound wires for each signal, cut exactly to size to make sure the signal arrived at the right moment, and without the bulk of the signal leaking away.
On this circuit board things are - let's put it friendly - a bit less organized than that. So by rights this really shouldn't have worked, the fact that it does absolutely amazes and inspires me.
One thing I like for prototyping with through hole parts is Verowire pen which kind of combines wire wrap with soldering. It uses thin wire in self-fluxing insulation. You can use the pen to wrap a bunch of components that go in series without wasting time for trimming the wire to length. Then you solder over the wraps and bite off the runs that shouldn't be there (e.g. when you wired a diode you remove the wire between its contacts).
> ... regular wires with plastic isolation, but those can be a pain to strip, even with a semi-decent stripping tool.
> Boil away a millimeter or 2 of enamel without cutting the wire off the spool.
The person spends 18 seconds (see the video) to "boil away" and tin the tip of the enamel wire, yet complains about using a wire stripper to strip the wire in 5 seconds.
I mostly use breadboards even with microcontroller stuff (at 16 MHz, or so), and never run into any problems for constructing semi-permanent circuits. The PCB version of breadboards (https://www.adafruit.com/product/571) also work pretty well. There area also little PCB adaptors to integrate surface-mount components on breadboards that work well.
This is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
Might be a dumb question, but isn’t the risk of cold joints proportional to your skill in soldering in general? Important context: I am definitely a noob to soldering
It is, yes. After some practice, you will not get cold joints. Or when there is a danger of a cold joint due to massive heat sinking around, you will know and be extra careful
When we had to bypass the onboard UARTs: https://0x0.st/PbKT.jpg
Is this really easier to work with than bodge wire (wire wrap)? Asking because I still have a few rolls and would rather not waste money.
I have 31 AWG wire. I wouldn't use anything else for PCB rework. Bends so easily, no stripping necessary, and the roll will never run out.
This pic is quite unsettling, I didn't understand why at first, but this blue wire pinched under the bolt...
Mechanical stress relief is my guess !
Most people today use Kynar hook-up wire for this sort of thing. Even WalMart stocks it.
Go carefully there. Kynar tends to wilt at soldering heat. Press insulated wires together when they're still hot and suddenly they can be kissing; a 1-diameter short is easy to overlook when you're inspecting your work.
I find it worthwhile to use teflon-insulated wire here. When I'm building a prototype, the last thing I want to have to distrust is my construction.
True. Kynar is good for toughness around square-cornered wire wrapping posts. Teflon will survive a touch of a soldering iron.
I found my wire-wrapping gun recently. If I put in new C batteries it might work.