Breadboards

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MareBear

Joined Oct 29, 2008
22
I am looking for a good site to get a solderless breadboard, I have purchased 2 different solderless breadboards and both have parts of the board with bad contact connections... It's very fustrating considering I am doing constant design labs that take me a year and a day to recalculate everything and redo all my schematics on PSpice and redo all coding on Matlab to figure out whats wrong only to find out its my breadboard. I will not buy any boards off of ebay, sorry!! If you have any good recommendations of a company please direct me towards them, I have found many companies but do not have experience with most so please if you know help me out :).
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
I live in Garland, next to Dallas, and go to Tanner's in Carrolton to buy mine. I have found the bigger ones to be of better quality, but unfortunately the Chinese have had their way with these suckers. The older units are infinately better, however you can't find them anymore.

Radio Shack carries them, and Altex in Arlington also carries them. Unfortunately, the are all basically the same. Like I said though, the bigger ones are better than the small units.

What gauge of wire are you using?
 

SgtWookie

Joined Jul 17, 2007
22,230
I've had good service and received good stuff from MPJA.
Their breadboards are here: http://www.mpja.com/products.asp?dept=283

This one is a handy size for small projects:
http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=4444+TE
The banana jacks are also binding posts; makes connecting and disconnecting your power supply nice and easy.
Twice the space for $3 more:
http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=4445+TE

You can easily damage breadboards if you try to jam oversize wires or TO-220 component leads (and similar) into the holes. They don't last forever, either.
 

SgtWookie

Joined Jul 17, 2007
22,230
Well, MPJA has a very similar powered board, but it's brand new and at $90, a lot less:
http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=17710+TE

However, having a built-in supply is not as cost-effective as having several non-powered boards and an external power supply.

An ATX or ATXplus12 form factor computer power supply can be obtained very cheaply (or free from a scrapped computer) and converted into a bench supply quite easily, with just a few parts (binding posts/banana jacks, switch, power resistor, indicator light).

If you don't have an ATX supply, MPJA has 'em on sale for $9.95 right now:
http://www.mpja.com/email/11-02-10a.asp?r=%%ref%%&s=5
Or a dual 250W redundant hot-swappable ATX supply for $4.95:
http://www.mpja.com/prodinfo.asp?number=17970+PS
 

Wendy

Joined Mar 24, 2008
23,415
The new one is using the same basic unit that all of the them are, the Chinese crap.



All the new stuff is the same. The one on eBay is the older variety I was talking about, it had quality control.

I use 24 gauge wire with mine, 22 is probably better.

This one is a real POS.

 

marshallf3

Joined Jul 26, 2010
2,358
I use 24, easy to find in CAT-5 cable but I've got a roll of plain single pair that's been used on telephone patch panels for decades. Agreed though, 22 would be better.
 
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