[sdiy] perf board tips and tricks

[Seb Francis]

tony Rolando wrote:
> Anyone care to share tips and tricks for getting good results?
>

For anything other than really simple circuits I will do the layout in 
my normal PCB routing software, drawing thick horizontal bottom-copper 
traces for the tracks and thin top-copper (or inner-layer) traces for 
any jumper wires.

The big advantage in doing it this way is the PCB software checks all 
the connections against the schematic netlist, so you know there can't 
be any mistakes.  When I used to design stripboard layouts on paper, I 
always ended up having to debug mistakes!

When I'm making a final circuit this way (which has already been tested 
on breadboard) I will break every stripboard track at each end to 
minimise stray capacitance.  This is accomplished easily by placing the 
stripboard on top of a print-out of the track layout and marking each 
track break in the next hole to where the end of each track can be seen.

Here's an example with some more detailed info on my track-breaking method:
http://www.burnit.co.uk/sdiy/index.php?page=joykontrol&subpage=layout

Seb