I could do that, I do plan on includijng a CD rom with the raw CPLD code and rom data as archival backup.


the idea is in case years down the road, if the Xilinx XC95108 goes obsolete. The board will have nice rows to make a replacement

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

Been very distracted for the last few months.


However, I did get a chance to draw up and have made a generic prototype board. It has (of course all areas can be used for anything one sees fit):

> 2 power supplies with LEDs
> Breakouts for DB9F and 3.5mm Stereo jacks
> 2 momentary PB switch breakouts
> 6 LED with resistors
> SIL header/connector area
> DIL/IDC header/connector area
> 2 SVG/TIL header/connector areas (for sensor/actuator 'bricks')
> .2" (5.08mm) spacing connector/terminal area
> 1.6mm FR4 board
> 1oz copper
> Tinned pads and solder mask
> All holes are plated through
> Power rails are double sided
> Power rails split into two power zones
> Component zones have 6x5 hole strips to accommodate a wide variety of DIP or other packages.

I have a few of these to spare if anyone is interested. My cost on them was $14.69 and I can probably send up to 3 in a padded envelope to anywhere in the US for under $10. PM me if you want any.



Here are some views of it:

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Bill

Methinks you can make mroe and sell to general public. Sweet design there!

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

Thanks.

I have considered that. We'll see if I get a favorable response here but I may do it anyway. I'd have order quite a few to get the price down to where I can make some money...

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Bill

You can also sell on the open market and I have a friend who has an electronics store who would be glad to stock boards. Any new lines always helps!

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

That's a very interesting proposal. Can you get us in touch?

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Bill

Yes, will pm you on it.

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"

That is a very attractive board for analog! I've used a ton of these Radio Shack 276-170 boards

over the last 25 years for analog circuits since this kind of circuits has a load of resistors and capacitors, and these boards work well; but yours has the following advantages:

• it's not limited to a single row of ICs like the 276-170 is
• every other set of strips has six holes per connection instead of five, which would be quite valuable since the 276-170 board with only five often leaves me putting two leads on one hole (if they'll fit), or soldering parts onto the leads of other parts (including onto the tops of IC pins), and parts on the bottom too
• Yours has both power and ground available next to every 5- or 6-hole connection trace. I usually put copper tape down that area on the 276-170 boards.

There's also the more obvious like that yours has a place to put pin headers and other things, but each of these features is either more suitable for digital work or requires an exact part number like the DC-10 and phone jacks and maybe the pushbutton switches to fit the holes. (I know that's not true of DB-9's.) The digital work is of course what this forum is about, but the digital is often there to control or take data from the analog. I do both, but I generally use wire-wrap for digital breadboarding, and then for analog, I use breadboards that have the rows of connected holes, like yours.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

Thanks for your comments Garth.

I use boards like this for digital too. I used to use wire-wrap but gave it up for 2 main reasons. First, the supplies have become much harder to get, at least around here, and correspondingly more expensive. Second, WW boards are more difficult to deal with with respect to mounting, handling and reliability. I admit, that could be due to the way I handle them, but still, it caused me endless hours of troubleshooting over the years.

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Bill

The delicate thing about wire-wrap is of course the pins. I put screws through wire-wrap boards to act as feet so the board never rests on the pins.



(The above picture was taken when there was nothing on my mezzanine board yet except a 3-level WW socket to show the clearance.) Obviously additional means would have to be taken if you wanted to throw the board in an attache case. That can be accomplished by mounting the board in an ABS plastic box. Even if you only use the bottom of the box and not the top, at least the pins are protected. Here's an example, although I never finished building this one:



When you take it out of the base of the ABS plastic box, and turn it over, you get:



You can see the pieces glued into the corners and the middle of the sides of the box, to hold the main board up at the right height, making the connectors line up with their holes in the box, and keeping the pins off the bottom. This is one of the computers shown in my (outdated) project pages on this site.

But as for electical integrity, I have never, ever had a wrap fail--not once--and I don't solder them or recommend soldering them. However, I am very careful to avoid touching the sides and corners of the pins, and to strip the wire only seconds before wrapping and then not touch the wire. I don't want any skin oils on either one. I cut the wire the right length so it's snug but not quite pulling the two pins it connects. This makes for the best electrical performance but also prevents unwrapping or snagging.

I have a dozen rolls of WW wire here, so I haven't checked prices in a long time. It looks like it's up to about eight cents a foot now, double what it was last time I bought. WW sockets are kind of expensive too, but my labor time is worth something I have to consider. The really expensive sockets were the WW PLCC sockets,

at around $10 for a 44-pin ten years ago, but I can't even find them anymore. Fortunately I have what for me will probably be a lifetime supply in my own stock. [Edit, 1/21/13: BigEd just pointed us to a source that stocks them: http://uk.rs-online.com/web/c/?searchTe ... ra=oss&r=t ]

_________________
http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

What supplies?... Do you still have your main WW tools? I've mentioned here, recently, where to get some cheap WW tools.

WW is a prototype, therefore it will most definately be more difficult in some respects. However, attention to detail will guarantee superior performance to other prototype methods.

I would recommend Vectorbord for placing WW sockets.

Yeah, I still have 3 tools (actually 4). A Just-Wrap tool, a standard screwdriver type tool and a electric gun that does not work well. Plus a special stripper tool.

By supplies I mean mostly wire and sockets.

You know, there may be reliable sources for them out there, but honestly, it's not always been a good technology for me. You still need to solder many components, and with the point to point wiring I prefer to do, you can just toss the resulting boards in a briefcase as Garth put it, or in a storage box, etc. They are every bit as robust as any PCB implementation. I know its a bit slower to do, but I like the results a lot better.

WW was great back when memory chips were tiny (circa 1978). You needed 64 2114's to make a 32K memory board. That was my biggest WW project ever. I would never have attempted that using point to point. But things are different today. Not nearly as much wiring to do.

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Bill

I added some pictures to my post above.

I stumbeled on this http://www.busboard.us/ better alternative to the Radio Shack 276-170 above that I've used so many of over the last 25 years:



Jameco carries it, with catalog number 2125034.

Bill: Thanks mucho, was at Ford this weekend. Your board ROCKS!

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"My biggest dream in life? Building black plywood Habitrails"