Prototyping Basics

We want to learn about prototyping here. Let's begin right away with the breadboard, where your prototype gadgets and where you will be experimenting with various configurations of your circuitry. Your circuits will be assembled in a breadboard. There's a large breadboard plus mini breadboards, and connectors for power, if the breadboard is large. If you turn the breadboard upside down, you can see that metal connectors electrically allow a connection to take place for anything that is plugged in a vertical column. Taking a jumper wire, and the signal will propagate through all the pins. So, If I connect my jumper wire to any pins, any other wire connected to the same column will be at the same voltage differential. We don't have a connection if we are connected to any of the other vertical columns. Here is the connection between jumper wires:

These are the correct circuits that are connected. Here is the back of a breadboard:

In addition to a series of vertical connector, there are 2 longer connectors that allow you. Breadboards have the exact same configuration.

For example in a UV distance pin, there is a ground pin (0V and VCC pin) 5V, so I can have 5V power and use the jumper wire to connect to this power. Use a breadboard power supply to get pins that are just the right dimension to plug into the power rails, and I can connect them as a result, and see that the negative pin of the breadboard power supply provides power to the blue power rail, and vice versa, and the same thing happens across the other side. The other thing is you can select the voltage that you can pass across the power rail through various jumper switches to engage one or the other. 

From the device mechanics, I can have a 3.3V power supply on one side and a 5V power supply on the other side just be manipulating some of the jumpers. The power supply gives the option of providing input power via a barrel connector or a USB power supply. 

You have several times the real estate for the mini breadboard. You get teh exact same characteristics, you still get your 2 power columns per segment and of course vertically the vertical columns behave in the exact same way. In addition on a bigger breadboard, you got your power connectors on the side.

 There is a little hole which you can pass wires We can also plug things in from the power supply onto the breadboard power rail. Go for a larger breadboard once gadget grows.

The next tools that I want to go over is jumper wires and there are a few more. Jumper wires give you the ability to connect parts. A female to male jumper wire has one to plug into the sensor and from there onto the breadboard so then the sensor is movable.

Here's female to male jumper wires: 

Here's male to male jumper wires:

And here's female to female jumper wires:

Female to female jumper wires are used mainly in the raspberry pi. Another jumper wire you need is alligator or crocodile clips and it is very useful when working with a multimeter. Let's measure conductivity. You can connect terminals to crocodile jumper wire then to a normal jumper wire, and the measure things from the breadboard after that. 

Another type of jumper wires are flat jumper wires.  Let's say we want to have a small circuit with an LED and a resistor. We connect the resistor and the LED as well. Eventually yoiu have a lot of wires hovering, so flat jumpers make it much easier to see what is happening with your circuit.  This makes it very easy to discern where the jumper wires begin and end. 

 Next, I want to go over the very basic tools or the essentials, to allow to play around with many arduino kits. Screwdrivers, you need a small set of precision screwdrivers because a lot of the components that you'll be working with like potentiometers and sound sensors have little components. A screwdriver with a flat head will allow you to turn the head of a potentiometer, allowing the calibration of various setting on the sensors. Something like this is not necessayr, but another set of tools is a bunch of tweezers, which come in a variety of types, shapes, and types. They are really good if you need to manipulate small things. Make sure you get the electrostatic tweezers without electrical charge on them, proteting the parts that you work on from static electricity. Finally, you can't really do much without wire cutters, and you can obviously cut wires and  and trim pins of parts.Let's say you're soldering a new part. You can cut off the slightly pointy end of the solder. You need a couple of tweezers one with a bent tip and a straight tip and my cutters. A

A very useful power supply is the breadboard power supply, but an alternative power supply needs an external power supply. There are things that provides power above X amount of volts. I plug it into the power board and the other end into the arduino and then you can see that you got power and blinking LED sketch to verify that arduino is working. This is what you want when you program the arduino. nother alternative would be to use battery power, and use power packs for this. Make sure the power supply provides decent amounts of differential, and you want to minimize waste, with a battle connector as well. The LED is blinking if powered correctly. Arduinos are very versatile, and you get a lot of power supplies.

Multimeters can measure both voltage and current, all of them can measure it, even the $10 multimeter. More expensive multimeters can detect a wider and more successful range to measure in. We want to play with a very simple circuit, using flat jumper wires. Say we have this circuit, connected through a 9 volt power supply. 

We need to tell the multimeter the circuit. You got 200 mV to 2000 mV so it indicates the range of the voltage that I want to measure. If 5V voltage, you should set the voltage to 20V since you should measure around 20 Volts, so we aregoing to move the dial to the 20V. Here are 2 spots to measure the voltage:

It reads 4.85 and 3.27 volts for 5V and 3.3V, respectively. Some breadboards do not work, so you fonud a spare power supply. And plug the red and black Leads into the second and third spots of the multimeter, as follows: 

Now, we want to move the LED, such that its anode is connected to a different column. We connect the probes where the on the other side so the circuit closes and the ammeter can measure current flow through it. 

And this is what measuring current looks like, adding the multimeter wire in the middle of the circuit. Same configuration though.

More expensive multimeters  have the benefit of measuring lower milliamp ranges. The next module to go over is the resistance and continuity and we need to take the component out of the breadboard and measure it when it is not connected, and you can plug it to a different part of the breadboard. 

We subsequently turn a dial to the Ω range. Make sure the resistor is separate and just simply measure from end to end. 

Here it is: 

The symbol on the diode looks like a Wi-Fi signal. Per: 

Noise is emitted in continuity testing, touching the probes together like a "BEEP!" nose. This indicates to the instrument that continuity detected in probe. We can measure continuity accross wires, and this indicates between 2 points of no resistance. 

There are continuities between the (+) and (-) pins of the boards as well. 

We need to measure voltage, amperes, resistance, and continuity.

The next step is soldering, and this is something that you will have to do. It is used for attaching headers and other things. I will go over various things that you will need in your soldering kit. Practice is more important than the tools. Always wear classes when soldering, like safety goggles. When you are soldering, you are heating solder to 200 degrees centigrade, and there's some moisture and air bubbles forming in the solder and can cause the solder explode, enough puff to hurt eyes, safety first. 

You'll have to solder the supplied header to the breakout, or make a project semi permanent by soldering components on a protoboard. You test the circuit on the breadboard, migrate to the protoboard.

Fortunately, the power that soldering irons have to use is very low, so the tip increases. 

You also should go get different solders to different projects. 

Go for unleaded solder, if you can.

Before you solder, use microfiber to remove all the loose materials on the pad. The no-clean flux pen is mostly used for very old boards. Solder pump helps to solder solder that you already put on a board. There should be a device to hold the board that you are working on so that you can do the soldering here. Make sure to get the proper adjustments when soldering the board, and the helping hand allows me to elevate board from the table, or turn things upside down to the other side. You need cutters as you complete your work with the board, and you get the pins inserted into the pad, and as you finish soldering, you have a little bit of the pin sticking out,  and you can use the cutting tool to remove the excess of the pin. 

You should have an extraction fan, becoause you don't want to be removing fumes, and make sure your room is well ventilated. Good cross-ventilation will prevent me from breathing in fumes. The tip tinner protects the tip of the soldering iron after the work is finished. Tipping the tip on the tinner protects the surface of the tip from oxygen, which extends the life of the tip. Use copper material instead of wet sponge to remove items from the soldering tip. We cut a corresponding number of pins onto a header, using a wire cutter. 

There's a few different ways to solder effectively. Either we can attach things to the breadboard, using the breadboard as a holder, and now you can do this to the breakout board. Another technique is to use a bit of tape to hold it steady while working on it, and we can use helping hands in order to do the soldering. Heat can go from the pin to the breadboard and the plastic melts if the soldering takes too long. It's better to use electrical tape to hold it steady. Touch the pin with the solder then touch the pin again on the other side with the iron, but don't tough the iron itself. Use the heat to melt the solder.

How do we get solder join to remove? Remove it with the solder pump! It takes a bit of time for the solder to melt. Keep your temperature low to get the liquid state of the solder a bit faster. Heat the solder then arm the solder pmp and press the button.

The solder is inside of the pump and you can subsequently remove the solder. 

Now we can have the board onto the breadboard. The essentials are helping hands, soldering iron 12-25W, Lead-Free Solder, a ways to remove fumes (a fan) and a pump and a cutting tool to trim pins or cutting headers into size.

You find yourself building gadgets on breadboards. You then want to take the gadgets apart and build it with the protoboard. You need a way to take whatever you build on the breadboard and make it permanent. The first one is to use a permanent breadboard, examples of protoboards. Another way to go about is to design your own pcb. The first lecture will talk about protoboards. Making your own PCB is a more advanced skill, and with a course more related to such a topic. A protoboard is the best way to go about maintaining your design and gadgets.

A breadboard is used to temporarity assemble the components, but it's not meant to keep your project together premenantly, the components will eventually fall out, and you want to reuse a breadboard for a new project. First don't care too much about it, dismantle in order to move onto a new thing. The other thing I can do is to make the circuit permanent. These you can do yourself with a PCB at the electronics store, and I want to focus on protoboards or permaboards first. There's basic protoboards, you can buy for a relatively low price, in terms of physical dimensions and the number of holes and arrangements. You can see the board has the same 2 power rails and turning it upside down you get the same stuff as the breadboards.

There are no "hard rules" and the objective is to end up with a reliable gadget. The top side you do the components and at the bottom side you do all the connections, and you can do this via soldering onto protoboard and on the protoboard you use wires for dimension you want to bridge then just solder them onto the protoboard. The holes got tint on both side so you can solder your components on both sides. You will have to make sure that all the connections are soldered at the bottom of the board. Remember solder where the conductive padding is. It's called the adafruit perma protoboard. You can also have a prototyping board on a PCB that has the right dimensions and the right pin headers on the Arduino. Everything can be organized with writing on the board raminding the purpose of each set of pins.  Sometimes you can match the headers of the arduino and the board tobether, and you can put cirucuit into a prototyping board and that way be able to connect properly to the board arduino. The same idea is in many other shields as well.  Ard.uino shields will be able to plug into the board very easily, as long as the pins are not bent, providing a small space for prototyping and it could be a button, transistor, and you can make it permanent by soldering into available prototyping spaces. Eventually you have to lean software that allows you to design pcbs, designing the schematic, and doing the layout placing physical components on the real estate on the eventual printed circuit board, allowing to create connections between those components in multiple layers. In arduino boards, 2 layers are enough. Once you have file with all the details to pcb, you can send it to a fabrication or manufacturer and will put designs through large machines, and then eventually you will have your pcb in the mail a while later.