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perfboard/stripboard drawing paper

I keep drawing ugly lines on paper before I start/after I screwed up building some circuit on stripboard or perfboard. Here's my workaround.

christophChristoph
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If a circuit contains more than an LED and a resistor, you probably want to build it on some kind of prototyping PCB with simple pads or strips. Even those require some sort of planning.

I noticed that I tend to use a pencil for designing those circuits - placing parts and wires before I solder anything. Having some sort of graph paper for this task allows me to erase parts and wires without destroying the underlying pattern.

The git repo (in the links section) contains the LaTeX source and printable pdf files for perfboards and stripboards. Use them to lay out your prototypes before you screw it up due to skewed lines and such!

  • 1 × Your current project that requires a perfboard/stripboard prototype
  • 1 × Computer and printer
  • 1 × Pencil

  • 1
    Step 1

    Either download one of the printable pdf files (and print it) or modify the LaTeX source to suit your needs and compile with

    pdflatex boardPaper.tex<br>

    and print the result.

    Note: don't put too much effort into printing to scale. If the result is bigger, you still have a grid (which is the main purpose), and more space to draw wires. That makes drawing easier, actually.

  • 2
    Step 2

    Start drawing!

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Lucas wrote 08/18/2014 at 11:17 • point
Is this at all related to Linus Akessons method of prototyping?

http://www.linusakesson.net/hardware/chiptune.php

I wonder how hard it would be (or if anyone has already) to recreate those scripts to create the eps files. Seems like a really neat way to prototype that eliminates a lot of mistakes.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Christoph wrote 08/18/2014 at 12:04 • point
Well, somehow it is related.

As it is, you can print the paper to scale, draw components and wires by hand, make the required amount of copies and glue it to perfboard/stripboard (for school classes for example), but you cannot currently create and place components in the tex files.

Nonetheless, the files can be extended to also draw lines, rectangles, whatever you want. Basically it's also possible to create shapes to be placed where you want them, but you would end up with a layout editor without any graphical user interface - surely some PITA.

It's of course possible to create eps files instead of pdf (or do a conversion) if that's what you want.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Benchoff wrote 07/31/2014 at 03:04 • point
Since this is the first LaTeX project I've seen on here, would you be interested in a TeX-based inline equation/math editor for hackaday.io? I'm thinking something like TeX The World, or the plugin that was on the xkcd forums a while ago.

I put a feature request on the git for Projects, but a few other things are taking priority - there are inverted color images for some reason.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Christoph wrote 08/04/2014 at 11:12 • point
Sorry I didn't notice there was a comment here...
LaTeX input, or a small subset limited to math input, would be great. However, there's mathurl as a workaround which I already used one of the project logs for explorad: http://hackaday.io/project/1052/log/3591-divide-and-conquer so this shouldn't need to be on top of the list imho.

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