Nice idea. But why do you drill out the holes? I just cut the traces between the holes with one of those snap-off blade utility knifes. Two cuts about 0.3 mm apart allows you to remove enough copper to make sure there is no connection left.

Thank you for the good idea. I'm really glad about this StripeBoard. Good for prototyping and for the first solder steps of my son. I will use the blue variant with lead free HASL. For interested people I added my kicad pcb and gerber files here: https://github.com/agehring80/PCB/tree/main/2sideStripeBoard

Ken, I have seen something for vero-board that shows the "rats-nest". Don't remember the name, but there are not many vero-board products out there.

I wrote a vero-board "channel" router but its only the core algorithm. You would probably want auto-placement as well,  as space between components is critical (usually more is needed than you think). You could certainly program a "maze" router to be strictly orthogonal to suit vero-board. I might have a look at it after I get my router input/output working. But how many people would be interested in a vero-board router?

Mike, something the watch out for is that the copper plating on the PCBs are very thin and for plate through holes it is very hard to un-solder components without lifting the copper. You might want to consider a single sided PCB (i.e. no plate through holes).

Also, use the silk screen to help identify the hole locations. It is a pain to count holes.

If you want to look at a completely mad example of using strip-board (where perhaps you should not) have a look at:

https://hackaday.io/project/12879-weird-cpu

I used DIYLC to design it!

AlanX

Your weird CPU project totally rocks!   That is a huge ambition for stripboard.  Very cool.

Thanks for your suggestions.

I know what you mean about plated through holes (PTH) and unsoldering difficulties.  I made a mistake placing an 8-pin header and had to use solder-wick to remove the solder from the holes.  I was able to get all of the pins free and remove the component, but it would have been easier with non-plated through holes (NPTH).  No issues with lifting pads - it seemed like the PTH construction had a side benefit of bonding the tracks solidly to the board.  Definitely pros and cons to both.  One pro for PTH is that components can be soldered to either side of the board.  I haven't needed to do that yet, so maybe not a practical advantage.  I might make a board run with NPTH to compare.  It's only a $2 investment to find out.

Great idea to add numbers to silk screen.  A definite for V2.   Counting holes gets tired fast.  Some stripboard is marked with numbers in the X direction, and letters in the Y direction.  For me, the letters are not very useful for counting.  Maybe the number/letter combo is good for identifying locations on the board?  

Do you see any benefit to letters, versus having numbers for both X and Y directions?

For V2 of this stripboard project I'm thinking to silk screen a Frontside/Backside indication.  And, I'm considering adding a thin silk screen line on top of each underlying track so it's obvious.  

You are doing better than me. I don't bother to try to unsolder components. Even a resister has a risk of lifting the copper (especially the second time around).

I use a full scale front and reverse (side) laser prints to guide hole location but I think a graph paper like grid (for the silk screen) would help a lot. Say a thick line for 10x10 and thin/dashed line for 5x5.

When you use strip-board, try to avoid the temptation of too high a component density. There will be design errors and assembly errors and having room to adapt is important.

Yes $2 each but  that does not include engineering and delivery. More like $10 each.

I am having complexity problems with interfacing KiCAD to my auto-router (okay, I am really just distracted by other things!), but I will look at coding a strip-board auto-router. No promises with regard to how good or bad it will be. That is the nature of experimentation.

A final though is to include a "standard" power supply on the board. Say a 5v power-pack plug or micro-usb. A long time ago I bought some micro-usb adapters for strip-board but I never got to use them. It was about the time I made the transition to PCB.

AlanX

Interesting idea. 👍 Could fill the gap between breadboard and fabbed PCB.

I've used Kicad pcbnew with freeRouting to assess the quality of component placements before populating perfboard that has pads, the idea being to minimise jumpers and their lengths. For stripboard, it would be nice if there was a routing program that would minimise and indicate the jumpers and breaks required.

My main beef with perfboard and stripboard is that the copper oxidises and makes soldering difficult. So I've sworn off them except in case of urgency or I only need to make one of something. HASL PCBs don't have this problem. I remember long ago at the workshop we had a chemical bath to clean copper. But I dislike chemicals, so I use sanding.

Thanks for pointing out the benefits of the HASL surface finish in these stripboard PCBs.  Definitely a reduced need for board prepping compared to the copper versions which absolutely require scouring with steel wool or fine sandpaper.