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Re: gEDA-user: Prototyping with SMTs



Karel Kulhavy wrote:
On Fri, Mar 10, 2006 at 11:33:55AM -0800, Samuel A. Falvo II wrote:
I'm old-school. Whenever and whereever possible, I prefer to
prototype what I'm working on incrementally. For example, my Kestrel
1 computer is a clear demonstration of this. It's built on one of
those cheesy Radio Shack breadboards, runs at 4MHz (although the
oscillator used in the pictures on the website is 1MHz), and took me
about two weeks to build.

But building on breadboard is slow and error prone.

PCB guards you against mistakes plus soldering is real fast, at least
with my 125W transformer gun. While the fab house is spinning it's
cogwheels, you can do something else.

As time is money, this may even be cheaper.
I've got to agree with this statement. It's faster to prototype in gschem, export it to PCB
and make the board. than to futz around with breadboards. In fact, these days, the only use
for breadboards that I have is for gender bending or some other type(s) of I/O conversion(s).


With todays footprint geometries and fine pin pitches, breadboards are pretty worthless.


Best



Marvin