BillO wrote:
So, this sort of thing is pretty much par for my course. I do occasionally get it right first go, but that is less than 25% of the time. Is it just me or do others have these experiences?
Very much not just you
I'm used to very rapid iteration in the software world—we literally have whole teams of people who think about nothing else—and figuring out what the equivalent is for hardware has been one of the most frustrating challenges. In fact, I'm kinda curious to learn what folks do in a professional setting; when you're under the pressure of budgets and deadlines, do you still draw up a PCB and send it out for manufacturing every time you want to test things out? It must take forever to get anything done!
I started out with breadboards, but they just don't work well for me… I see that some folks build some amazing things with them, but I don't really have the space for them, and, if you move them around the shop, they become very unreliable very fast.
So I ended up moving on to PCBs; while I love how cheap it is to get a really good quality product that will last these days, I had exactly the same experience as you: Very few boards work right out of the gate, and some have far too many mistakes to even bodge out. Plus, you still have to wait a week or two for them to arrive in the mail, which really kills any momentum you build in your projects. You can
kinda make up for it by having multiple projects on the go at the same time, but then the context switching becomes very expensive.
Recently, I've been experimenting more with wire wrapping and, much to my surprise, I am really enjoying it. I had originally discarded it because of how expensive the hardware is, and because it seemed hard to get right, but I landed on a method that allows me to use inexpensive pin headers and SMD adapters, and now I love the flexibility and immediacy that it brings. Unlike with breadboards, you end up with something that is both easily modifiable
and very sturdy and reliable; mistakes are easy to fix (and the fixes look indistinguishable from the originals!), and iterations take minutes or hours instead of days. I still start by drawing up a schematic, and so it's a short hop to drawing up a PCB once my prototype works.
Anyway, sorry for a bit of a rant. This topic has been on my mind a lot lately