Electronic – Breadboard Quality questions

breadboarddamage

I'm an electrical student in my second year and I'm using a breadboard for multiple lab classes. I'm thinking that my breadboard is starting to fail inside and I'm having a hard time troubleshooting circuits and getting some weird result. Today I had a JK Flip Flop hooked up as a Frequency divider and output on the oscilloscope was coming out a extremely high frequencies and there was no amplitude. One second the output would show up and then another second the output would disappear. I'm wondering where to buy a high quality breadboard since the ones we used to get are not made anymore. The breadboard I have has a hard plastic back so you can't push leads through the backing by accident very nice feature. Now that my circuits are becoming more complicated I don't want to have a breadboard that fails me in lab class. Any suggestions would be great, thanks.

Best Answer

I have used plug in breadboards for many decades. I own dozens of them. They are a marvellous tool and are well worth using if used with due care and intelligence.
However, they can also cause unexpected problems. The tradeoffs are worthwhile overall but you must always be aware of the dangers.

Breadboard quality varies. Price is some indicator of quality but obviously some people will sell you cheap junk at whatever price they can get you to pay. But, if you can buy a given brand anywhere at much lower than average price it is liable to be suspect.

  • Be prepared to use them with care, take care of how you insert wires into them and be realistic in what you expect of them.

    NEVER plug larger leaded components into them. One forced insertion may weaken the spring at that point forever. If you want to use larger leaded components, solder a small extension of thinner wire onto them. The venturesome could wrap many turns of wire around a component lead to remove the need to solder. This would often work well - but YMMV*, as always.

    Use smooth plated wires without nicks. Do not use bar copper wire which can corrode. Do not use abrasive wires (nicked etc)

    Be aware that the strips have high capacitance between adjacent rows - circuits that are adversely affected by a picoFarad or few of interstrip coupling are not good candidates.

    Do not pass high currents through the breadboard. It may cause no problems now or in future. Or may.

    Be aware that wires may pull out or short or conspire against you.

    Components with very small diameter leads (eg some TO92 transistors) MAY make poor contact. I usually have no problems with TO92 style transistors.

    Even Olin says breadboards have their place.
    So they must be OK.
    :-)


Your flipflop problem MAY have been caused by a floating set or reset piu - ie not a fault of the breadboard.

What frequency was the flipflop operating at?
Frequencies of a few MHz may be OK.
10 MHz maybe.
Higher than that is "adventurous".


*YMMV = Your mileage may vary ~~= "Are you feeling lucky, Punk?"