[petschge]

But then you get crappy breadboards that once in a while gives a bad connection. Without any visual clue. That can be very hard to debug, especially for the hardware newbie Ben Eater is teaching. Spending an extra $50 to make the process hassle free and enjoyable is money well spent.

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

Better yet, use wirewrapping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_wrap) instead of breadboarding, so quality of the board doesn't matter. Buy a wirewrap stick (20 USD), some crappy perfboards from China (10 USD), some wires (5 USD), some long DIP headers (10 USD), and you're good to go. You may still need two or three breadboards for quick experiments.

I'm currently working on a homebrew Z80 computer. I'm at the stage of moving the preliminary designs to PCBs, but from my experience, wirewrapping is a lot better than breadboarding when you start building circuits with many signal wires. Breadboards are quick and simple at first when you can "plug and play", but it would quickly become a nightmare when the number of connections and wires exceed 200. It may be a less concern for a modern microcontroller as i2c and SPI are serial interfaces, but on a 8-bit computer, you'll hit this number really quickly, because the system bus is 24-bit (16-bit addr, 8-bit data), parallel. A bus driver using two unidirectional buffer has 24 x 2 + 8 = 56 wires, two RAM chips have 48 wires, a ROM has another 24 wires, it's already 148 wires now for a bare-minimum system without even an I/O port. It will get out of control soon. Also, a 16-bit machine will become a nightmare even quicker as they have 32-bit bus.

On wirewrapped boards, you'll never get a bad connection without any visual clue, the connection is as solid as soldering, and there are no jumper wires hanging in the mid-air to stop you from probing it using an oscilloscope. Strongly recommended, to learn more, search keywords "wirewrap electronics" at YouTube.

[duskwuff]

> some long DIP headers (10 USD)

You're severely underestimating the cost of wire-wrap sockets. They're a low-demand item, so they're rather expensive; a few dollars for each socket is typical, and DIP40 sockets can get into the $10 range. (The sockets will cost more than most of the parts in them!)

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

> You're severely underestimating the cost of wire-wrap sockets. The sockets will cost more than most of the parts in them!

Which is why getting them from China is a good idea. I'm building the real thing and I'm well aware of that, but I've found a very economical solution: I've found that buying single-row 40-pin sockets, like this one (https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32959627004.html), is a good low-cost alternative to wirewrap sockets, it only cost you one dollar each.

It's not extremely easy to use, as you have to cut them and manually plug two rows of them to make a poor-man's DIP header, but not difficult either, and doing it is straightforward. Also, if the socket is too rough for the components you need (for example a heavy ZIP socket, or a DIP-40/64 chip), I found you could install the wirewrap DIP header to the board first, then plug a generic, cheap DIP socket on top of it, then plug your ZIF socket on top of those.

The only real disadvantage is the increased weight and height, so the solution is not very elegant, but hey, one 40-pin header only costs you one dollar, 10 dollars buy you ten 40-pin headers, which is good for ~15 chips!

[hermitdev]

I did wired wrapped electronica in college around 20 years ago. Wire running can easily become a dishrevelled mess. We also only had one color wire available, making non trivial difficult to follow and extremely difficult to debug.

Personally, I found my bread board circuits more aesthetically pleasing and easier to reason about. I had 4 different colors of wire, I always ran my wires in the cleanest manner possible using the most direct and shortest wire.

Probably the most complicated bread board circuit I wired up was an 8KB RAM bank for a 16bit microcomputer. My only real wire wrap project was when we prototyped an MP3 player driven by an AVR.

[bcaa7f3a8bbc]

> We also only had one color wire available, making non trivial difficult to follow and extremely difficult to debug.

This is no longer a problem today.

> using the most direct and shortest wire.

Unfortunately, it's often not even possible! A DIP-40 chip already occupies most columns, leaving only two or three columns for wiring. Impossible to wire the bus directly...