How To Build Circuits On Stripboard or Veroboard

hi folks in this video we're going to build a simple LED flasher circuit on a piece of stripboard which is also known as veroboard the circuit diagram for our circuit looks like this but in order to build it on stripboard we need to convert it into a layout diagram and this will help us decide where we need to put all the different components on the board if you'd like to see how to do that click the link at the top of the screen to see how to design stripboard layouts stripboard comes in sheets like this it's important to leave the wrapping on until you're ready to use it as this will prevent the copper strips from oxidizing if the copper does get oxidized you can however just clean it off using some kind of abrasive material we'll be putting the components in on this side and then we'll be soldering the legs of the components onto the copper strips on this side so next we need to cut a piece of strip board to build our circuit on and if we look at the circuit diagram here we can see that there are 19 holes uh in terms of how wide the board is going to need to be and then if we look down the other way it's going to be about 14 holes down this way or 14 strips so we'll just Mark out a piece of the board now and then we'll cut it just one other thing to note as well is that although it looks like the copper strips on the board are actually on the side that's facing us on this board the copper strips that we can see here are actually on the underside of the board so this image is almost as if the board is made of glass and you're seeing the corpor strips on the back of it so just that can be a bit confusing sometimes when people are new to using stripboard we put the components in on the side that has no copper strips the copper strips are on the back but just when we're using this program it looks like the copper strips are on the front of the board so we just need to count the number of dots across by the number of strips down and then we should be ready to cut so I've just counted 21 holes across just to give me a little bit extra room and then 15 down just again for a little bit of extra room so we're just going to mark that now there we go so to cut the board what we need to do is use a carpet knut or box cutter and then we need to score the board and we're going to cut across the carpet tracks like that next place the board on the edge of a table or something similar and then what I'm going to do is just cover up the part of the board I'm not going to use with some card press down firmly on it and then it should just snap like that make sure as well to always cut on the side with the copper strips otherwise when you break the board like that the copper strips won't have been cut and they'll start peeling it'll be very difficult to work with so should just be able to lift the board like that and it comes apart fairly easily next we'll do the other side it's a little bit easier to score this time because we don't have to cut the copper tracks just put it into the groove and run it across a couple of times and snap there we go we have the piece we need if there's any little bits left over you can always trim them off with a pair of snips make it nice and neat there we go now that we have our piece of Bo we just need to flip it over this is the important part flip it over and we're going to put the component components in on the plastic side not the copper side okay so looking back at our layout diagram the first part we want to put into the board is the 555 timer chip now actually we're going to be putting a socket into the board first and the reason for that is that if you want to change the chip it's easy to do because you can just pull it out of the socket but it also prevents heat damage from happening to the chip uh rather than soldering the chip directly in you're just soldering in a socket and you can see here the chip is shown as being semi-transparent on this diagram and underneath it you can see these circles and these circles are where we would use a little cutter like a drill bit 3mm drill bit or a track cutter to remove the connection between both sides of the chip we don't want to have the different legs of the chip being connected together so if we didn't cut those carpet strips that would be the case they would be short circuited so we need to grind away the harer strips just in those locations there but we'll do that a little bit later on so for now we're just going to position the Chip And if we look we count across nine so nine holes across and then 1 2 3 4 five uh down and that's where we're going to position our chip so we're just going to count across by nine so 1 2 3 4 five 6 7 8 nine so that's here and then five down one two three four five so this one here so now we just get the chip socket and you notice with these chip sockets that they have a little Notch cut out of them and this corresponds to where pin number one is going to go so I'm going to put this in here like this and then just to stop it from coming falling out I'm just going to put a piece of tape across it like this okay so now it's held in place and when we turn it over we can see just about see the pins sticking out on the other side okay so before we start soldering just have a quick look at some of the equipment you might find useful so the first one is kind of importance this is a soldering iron so you just want one say about 25 to 30 watt soldering iron nothing too fancy but one with a nice uh small tip on it because it's going to be working with you know fairly small components so that's that then obviously a stand to keep it in and then in the stand you're going to want to have some uh either damp kitchen towel or sponge just to clean your soldering iron off then uh another alternative is instead of using that you can actually use a little Brill pad and just use that to clean the tip of the soldering iron so you should have a nice clean tip on it nice and shiny then another useful item is a solder sucker and we use this to remove unwanted solder so so say if you want to remove a part of from the board you can just heat the solder up and then it sucks it off the board and another useful tool then is this which is the track cutter so we use this to cut the tracks obviously you're going to need some solder as well so I'm just using 1.2 mm uh 6040 uh leaded solder I find leaded solder easier to work with but you can use UNL it but it is a little bit more difficult to work with okay so before we start soldering it's worth having a look here at the technique for how to solder onto stripboard so if we look at this board here we can see we have a couple of components put in so this is an LED this is a resistor these little brown rectangles here these are the strips this is representing the strips and then obviously these components are pushed into the board from the underside and the pins are sticking out the top the resistor has been soldered in so you can see that there's little blob of solder here on both of the legs of the resistor so if we wanted to solder in the LED first thing we need to do is bring the soldering iron up so that it's touching both the leg of the LED and also the copper track at the same time and you can see we've just placed a little bit of solder on the end of the soldering iron just a small amount we bring the soering iron down so that it touches both the track and the leg of the component at the the same time thereby heating both of the different parts then we bring in some solder wire and we touch the solder wire off of the pin and the track at the same time and it should melt in such a way that it sort of goes like this so this is what you want a nice gently sloped like a little mountain um flowing from the pin down onto the copper track okay and this here is an example of what it actually looks like um on a real uh board that has just been soldered so nice gently sloping sort of flow uh and also we can see that it's joined on nicely onto the pin here there's no little gaps between the pin and the soer and it also flows gently here and also very importantly that the solder doesn't flow onto uh either of the tracks on either side of it okay so that's really important if some solder does end up going uh across onto a neighboring track you can remove it first of all you might use the soer cirer to remove any excess solder and then when you've only a small bit of solder left on the board what you can do is you can gently run the soldering iron up and down this groove here and it will actually separate so the solder will stick to the two separate tracks but not to the plastic bit in the middle make sure that the solder you're using contains Rosen flux what this does is it helps to clean the copper as you're soldering onto it and make sure that the solder will stick properly it's very hard to solder without using um flux when you're soldering okay so let's start soldering I've placed the stripboard into a little soldering stand and I have it set so that it's completely level this is really important if it's not level the soer May kind of flow downhill if you want to call it that and that can cause problems so make sure it's very level and securely held by the crocodile Clips next I'm going to get the soering iron and because it's been sitting in the stand for a little while you can see the tip is kind of gone gray so we need to just clean it so just going to bring over the stand here and I'm just going to clean the soldering iron like that and we should have a nice silvery tip now okay so before I do anything else I'm just going to apply a tiny little bit of Soler to that okay and now I have that there and what I want to do then then is I'm going to bring this so that the sort of flatter Edge is touching the pin of the chip holder and also the copper track so I'm just holding it like that and then I bring some solder in from this side there we go it's done okay so that's the first joint it can take a little while to get the hang of things so it might be worth practicing on a spare piece of stripboard and maybe with a couple of things like resistors first just to get the hang of it I'm just going to do the rest of the uh pins [Music] now if you want to check your work afterwards you can always bring in a little magnifying glass and have a close look just to make sure that none of them are touching and it looks like they're all okay also looks like none of them have any dry joints so that's good it can be a good idea to check as you're going to make sure that there are no short circuits in other words tracks that are joined together that shouldn't be so one way to do that is just to get your multimeter and set it to the uh continuity setting okay and when you have it in the continuity setting when you press the probes together it makes a little beep sound so what we're doing here is we can check then to see if any of our tracks are connected so if I connect to the first one and the second one no beeps so then I connect to the next two no beeps next two no beeps so that's good there's no there's no short circuits between them now's a good time to uh cut those tracks using the track cutter so I'm just going to hold the board steady and then just place the track cutter into one of the little holes and we just turn it a few times until it grinds away enough of the copper to remove it we don't have to uh go all the way through the board that wouldn't be good okay all we want to do is just to remove the copper track itself so it usually doesn't take too long okay and that one looks like it's done let's just uh we zoom in a little bit yeah we can see that the uh the copper track is now gone so I'm just going to do the rest now we'll just take a little look and bring it up a little bit closer yeah you can see that we've properly cut the copper so the no join from one side to the other okay so the next component we're going to put in is one of these little KSP 2222a transistors so I'm just going to cut that one out and then we're just going to remove it from its packaging you can just usually pull these like that now what's nice about these is that the legs are already spaced out to the right uh distance which matches up with the pin holes on on the board which is 0. one of an inch and so we just have to position this the correct way so in this case it's going to be going in here and funny thing is with these kinds of transistors sometimes the flat side faces this way and sometimes faces the other way depending on which way the collector base and emitter are located but they're not always the same so you need to check the data sheets whenever doing that so again just to make sure that it's held in security we're just going to put some tape on it and then we can flip over the board once again make sure you have a nice clean soldering iron okay and then just put a little tiny bit of solder on it and then we're going to bring it in from the side and apply it down like that same again with the next leg and the last one there we go it's really important to clean the tip as often as you can okay because it gets oxidized really quickly so usually in between every joint unless I'm doing just a few small ones close together in a row I'll tend to C it okay it's a nice clean tip like that so next we have the LED okay so whenever you're using an LED just a couple of things the long leg is the positive one short leg is the negative one you can also check because when you turn the LED like that you can see that there's a flat Edge right here and that flat Edge corresponds to the negative side of the LED okay so short leg flat Edge negative side so the negative side will be going closest to ground and in our particular board it's going to be going in right here and again the pins are spaced exactly the right distance apart to match these holes so again clean soldering iron a little bit of solder touch the track and the pin together there we go same with this one there we go next we have the 330 Ohm resistor so I'm just going to pop that in here and in here next we have a 1K resistor connected between the base of the transistor and pin number three on the 555 so we'll just need to make this a little bit narrower okay so we have pin three here so one two three and I'm going to pop that in right here and then the base of the transistor that should fit about like that so for some of the next connections we're going to need to use some 22 AWG that's American wire grade uh hookup wire that we can use um and I'm just going to cut this into different pieces although I'm not going to use red I'm going to use blue so first I'm just going to strip the end of this blue wire here so to do that I'm just going to use my Snips you could use a cable cutter but I'm just going to use this so this is just a pair of snips and what I'm doing is I'm holding it like this so that I have a little bit of control over it okay so I put my thumb here and I'm using my my fingers like that and that gives me enough control so I don't end up cutting the wire so then I just want to strip off a little bit so gently squeeze and then just pull and eventually just get it off there we go okay so there it is stripped and what I'm going to do next is just bend it easiest way to do that is to use a pair of uh long nose pliers like that and then what I want to do is measure roughly how much I'm going to need so in this case we're going to be going from here down to pin three so we really don't need too much but there's much here and then I going to need to strip off a little bit on the end there so I'm just going to cut this now and then I'll strip off the remaining piece instead of using the Snips I'm going to actually cut it so let's going to straighten it out again and I'm going to use my trusty box cutter again and I'm going to position this about out here and I'm being very careful because it's a sharp blade just gently rotating it along there just to score it enough and then I'm just going to pull it off like that and now we have the second part so I didn't just fold that up using the along those pliers and then we should be able to position it into place here we go now I'll just speed up the video while I put in the rest for for now that's almost everything so I'm just going to put some tape across these and then solder them in one or two more components after that but that's about it it's very important to make sure that the legs of all the components that are coming up to the board are very straight okay if you leave them lying at an angle it can make it much harder to solder because the solder can to flow in the wrong direction then it's also very important not to leave aering are touching the corporate tracks for too long because if you leave it too long they'll get too hot and they can actually melt off the board which can be a bit of a night miror okay so I've zoomed in a little bit on the board I've just finished doing the soldering but there's one or two little problems you can just see here I'm just going to point with the soldering iron you can see there's a joint here that's not fully finished the solder is not making contact with the pin there's also one that is potentially bad uh just here where you can see a little black out outline around the pin itself so it just needs to be reheated so I'm just going to fix those do now so again clean the old soldering arm put a little bit of solder on it and then I'm going to come in here for this one and now that one's fixed and then I'm just going to reheat this one that should be fine now I'm just going to check the board for short circuits one more time so going to put the multimeter onto continuity and then I'm going to test each of these now in this particular case I actually have an LED here so there should be some form of continuity but but it won't beep because it still has to pass through the LED but I'm just going to check the other ones no beep so far that's good no beeps no beeps they're looking good the beep is just the probes touching each other one thing to be careful for as well is that your crocodile Clips don't short pins because that'll give you a false reading okay so it's all good now you can also use the continuity setting to test your LEDs so I'm just going to put the positive leg of the Probe on the positive pin of the LED and then the negative leg of the or lead of the probe to the negative of the LED and you can see a little bit of light shines through it so that means that we know that that led is okay so it's just a handy thing for testing LEDs in the future now here's a piece of stripboard where we have two separate pairs of tracks and the first pair if we test them at the probes it's fine there's no beeps okay but if we move to the next pair you can see that we get a beep and that means that they're joined together basically the current flows from one track to the other through this piece of soer so that's not something we want so it can be a little bit difficult to get rid of but I'll show you how to do it now okay so to fix this problem first of all we need to get a clean soldering iron so just make sure we've cleaned it off and then we're going to add a little tiny bit of solder to the tip that might seem a little odd because if we want to remove solder why would be be adding more but it just helps to make a connection with the existing solder already on the board so what we do then is we get our solder pump and we just press it down like that and then we heat the solder on the board and when it turns to liquid we then suck it up with a solder pump okay and what happens with the solder pump is you can see that it's sucked out the solder and it's already solidified in it okay so now we can take a closer look at the board and you can see that that did a pretty good job of of separating those two tracks let's just check out with the probes yep no beeps so that's great so let's say that they're still crossing over what you can do sometimes is just separate the tracks by running the hot soldering are in between them like this it's not as good as using a solder sucker but it does manage to separate them it doesn't matter if there's a bit of solder on these tracks um as long as it's not joining the two tracks together now if you accidentally cut the wrong track and you need to repair it it's not too hard to do okay so this is an example of a track that's been cut all we need to do is get a piece of wire like this and then what we're going to do is we're going to Tin that wire so tinning it means that we're going to be applying some solder to it to make it stick more easily okay so I have some solder here and I'm just going to again apply the solder to the soldering AR and then I'm going to heat up the piece of wire so heating up the wire with the soldering iron okay and in doing so then I'm going to touch it off the solder metal and what that does is it applies a little layer of solder onto the wire itself and this will make it stick a lot easier onto the board then we just apply a little bit of solder to the tracks and then we get our piece of wire that we tinned and we should be able to put it in position there we go we've now bridged the Gap then we just snip off the end and that's a repair so there's just a couple more components to solder in so the first one I'm going to put in is this capacitor here it's an electrolytic capacitor and I'm just going to fit it in here it should fit nicely in it's very important to make sure that when you're putting these in that the side with the stripe as in this part here faces to where your ground is going to be okay so if I just take it out again you can see that one of the legs is longer just like our led the long leg is the positive the short leg is the negative and this is the side that has to go to ground it's very important to put this in the right way around because if you don't they sometimes can explode and then the last component other than the chip is just a battery connector so this just comes with a couple of wires so the red wire is positive and I'm just going to bend them down like that bend the other one down and then we put them into the board like that so one for the positive and one for ground or the negative so just taped them down and soled them in now at this stage it would make sense to snip off all the excess uh leaves so I'm just going to start trimming them now I'll just leave the transistor ones on for a minute in case I need to take it out again okay okay so the last component to put in is the chip it's a 555 timer and when you get these out of their packaging sometimes you'll find that the legs are spread a little bit too far apart so it's uh useful to just get the chip put it down on the bench and just squeeze it slightly so that the legs are now kind of more in line that'll help you fitted into the socket better okay so I'm putting in the chip just make sure that you line up the notch on the top of the chip with the notch on the socket and then just place it in carefully making sure that all of the pins are going into the holes before you push it down firmly okay and then it's in place now the next thing to do is connect up our battery and test our circuit to see if it works so we're getting a light coming on but that doesn't look quite right it should be flashing so there must be some kind of problem with the circuit okay so we just disconnect the power again and we'll have a look so I actually spotted the problem problem is just here we have this wire here should be connected to pin one on the chip but it's actually just the row above it it should be in the one below so there's the problem so no worries all we have to do is just take it out and move it a little bit so what we need to do is just again apply a little bit of Soler to the soldering AR then we need to get our solder sucker and with the solder sucker we'll just prepare it and then we need to reheat this bit of solder right here on this track and then use the solder sucker to remove it now we might have to do it a couple of times before we've removed enough solders so I'm just going to heat it up again still another time to go we're finally starting to get enough solder taken away now sometimes there may still be a little bit of solder joining onto the pin and it may be difficult to just pull it out directly so what you can do is you can just turn the board over until you can see the other side like this and then you can grab the particular wire you want to take out using something like a long noose pliers so I'm going to grab it right here and then we just heat The Joint again and there we go it comes comes out much more easily now while I'm at it I'm also going to take out the other end of the wire because I just in case it's made it more brittle doing that so I'm just going to heat up this joint and the wire comes out really easily so now I'll just put in a new wire and that should fix that so now let's try connecting it up again and see what happens okay so I'm just going to connect power and we have a flashing or at least the LED turns on turns off turns on turns off so there we go it's working okay it's slightly different to the version I had shown you in the beginning of the video which had a faster flash rate and that's just because we replaced the 10 microfarad capacitor with a 220 microfarad capacitor that takes longer to charge so ultimately that means that the output of the 3555 is going to be slower so you're going to have a longer pulse time and a longer off time as well okay so just a couple more troubleshooting tips so if you find that your 555 timer is getting hot then that's a definite sign of something wrong usually it could be caused by a short circuit between some of the pins or possibly you might have the 555 in the wrong way around uh another thing you can check is your transistors now the circuit has to be off to test this but usually if you set your M multimeter to the diode setting and you connect the positive lead of your meter to the base and the negative lead to the emitter you should get a reading something like that 762 or sometimes it's a08 or some other value but something like that depends on the transistor that you're dealing with if you get a value like a one that means that there's no connection at all and if you get um a beep that means there's a short and that so either of those would be in your transistors most likely dead but you so you should be getting you know a reading of some kind of number you know 7.68 uh that kind of value uh like we're getting here we're getting 761 okay and one other thing we can test then is we can test the resistors to make sure that they're okay so if we set our multimeter to resistance that's the omega symbol and set it to a value higher than any of the resistors you're expecting to find on the board so 20K in this case and then we can measure the resistance by putting our probes at either side of the resistor now this is 32 but this is 32 of a kiloohm which is 320 ohms which is close enough to 330 ohms resistors are never 100% accurate so then this one here we should be getting 1 kiloohm and we're getting 98 of a kilm so that's pretty good then we have this one here which is uh 1K again so we're getting we're getting let just check it again we're getting .99 and then this one here should be 10 KMS but because it's got a capacitor connected up to it h it takes a little while for it to get up to the full 10 but uh looks like we're getting the right value here okay so here you can see the finished circuit looks pretty much the same as the diagram okay okay folks so here's a quick look at the circuit diagram again in case you want to build a circuit yourself and also you can change the capacitor for smaller or larger value depending on how fast you want it to flash and then just a couple of safety items so always make sure to wash your hands after handling solder because it contains lead and uh if you're going to eat a sandwich afterwards uh it could come off your hands and go into your food so always make sure to wash your hands secondly make sure the room you're in is well ventilated when soldering as the fumes from solder um come from the uh solder flux which can cause occupational asthma if you breathe it in on a regular basis so always make sure that the room is well well ventilated next never turn the voltage on your power supply up too high because that could cause your circuit to uh go on fire uh also ensure components like capacitors are inserted correctly because if they're in the wrong way around they can sometimes pop or explode soldering irons also very hot so make sure to use a stand when using them and remember remember that you know they may be hot so always hold them by the handle don't be tempted to pick them up by the metal part another thing that's useful is to wear safety glasses when soldering and testing circuits just in case you get some solder in your eye or in case a piece of wire uh flies into your eye when you're cutting it be careful with sharp blades as well and also check tools like your power supply and soldering iron before you use them in case the cables are frayed or the component itself is faulty okay folks I hope you enjoyed this video if you did don't forget to like And subscribe see you next time

Channel: TekSparkz

Views: 31,199

Keywords:

Id: GHtCEed583w

Length: 39min 45sec (2385 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023