I'm a hobbyist working mostly in DC projects. For development and testing, I use breadboards, and later a perforated board. My projects are normally low count: an Arduino Nano/Pro Mini + a few ICs.
All my works are one-of-a-kind, and making a PCB is out of question for me.
I use the ICs and physical board itself to test the layout of components on board. I have Fritzing, but it's not up to the task for planning the physical layout; it's more like an ideal vision of the circuit where wires have no thickness and every thing fits neatly in the matrix.
My problem is that sometimes I paint myself in a corner: after soldering a few things, I found the next pin buried under other wires and components; no way to solder anything. I'd been searching for tips, found none. How is your flow work? How do you do these things?
Here some questions:
- Solder all component first and wire them later?
- Wire each component directly to Vcc, Gnd and shared signal or use rails?
- How to layout for changes? Maybe I need to add something in the future.
Best Answer
Your suggestions are spot on.
Solder your components first, but think about what you could use as a wire, e.g. a resistor can be used as a jumper. ICs are the main thing to put in first, as they are set and will have a lot of dense connections. Try and work in a matrix, with all wires/components running along rows and columns.
Rails are best - you'll have lots of things going up to V+ and down to ground so fit around that.
Leave yourself space in the prototyping phase. You can scale down later if need be, but once you've started small it's hard make it larger. A bit of planning will go a long way :)
You could also try some simple stripboard layout software. A number of them are paid (and surprisingly expensive), but PEBBLE is free and is a good starting point at least.