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.
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.
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).
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
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
Any recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?
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 ;)
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).
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
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...
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.
When we had to bypass the onboard UARTs: https://0x0.st/PbKT.jpg
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 !
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.
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.