This week on The Factory, we are on the quest for the perfect protoboard. That and other project updates coming up. So in the short time that we've been running this Factory series, the Core Electronics product design team has grown with Peter joining a couple of months ago and just yesterday we've had someone new join the team, Brenton joins us.

So while Peter and I will continue to work on the PiicoDev family of sensors and modules, Brenton is going to work on more general interest maker favourite style products. Power supply modules, adapters, useful maker electronics like real-time clock, expanders perhaps, USB, UART converters, all those things that make for a well-kitted out maker lab that we can make right here. And so if you take all those things that makers need day to day and you filter it by order of importance, I think that really right at the top of the list you'll probably find the humble electronics protoboard.

Every protoboard that I've used before has had something that's just not quite right with it. You know, like it uses circular pads so you can't, you know, solder join together. I've never really had success just dumping solder into a protoboard to create like traces out of solder, just doesn't work out for me. It's too big, it's too small, it's annoying to do point-to-point wiring where you have to wire every single line. So you know like breadboard style prototyping boards where you have basically the breadboard layout but on a solderable board is a great start because you've got all these connections that are made for you and it's just like working with a breadboard.

So we've tasked Brenton with coming up with what the perfect prototyping board means to him and this is what he came up with. Now this is modelled off the venerable 777 protoboard. It's not exactly the same but it's pretty close. What you have are two side-by-side breadboard layouts with power rails in between in the standard breadboard spacing which means that you could take say a breadboard power adapter and plug it into this board to deliver power to your board.

But we've gone one step further. Taking a look at the top of the board here we have this row of accessory ports. I'll turn on CAD for a minute. Look at that! There are provisions to power the board built right into the breadboard. So you could bring your own DC barrel jack and pick up power from some solder pads. Here's the polarity indicator. There's provisions for 5mm and 3.5mm pitch screw terminals so you could bring in power ground. There's enough to bring in a split rail supply for instance. And there's even a provision for a USB Model B socket.

And this took a little bit of discussion. USB Model B is clearly a device plug. You see some breadboard power adapters out there with a Model A plug in them but that's actually kind of rare to find if you think about it. The USB Model B. Why did we go for this guy when USB-C exists? And USB-C, it's like what USB was always meant to be. But we went with USB Type B because it's through hole. Yes, USB-C is smaller, it's like you know, what would you call that? Symmetrical or it goes in both ways. But USB-B is something that is easy for a beginner to solder.

We chose these connectors because they're pretty ubiquitous. Like everyone's got a DC barrel jack floating around in their stack of drawers at home. They're ubiquitous, they're through hole soldering and they're pretty easy to find on any kind of electronics distributor. Of course we'll offer them alongside the protoboard to make things convenient. So you can see here we've broken out USB power and ground. We've also brought out D plus and D minus. I mean it'd be rude not to right? But also that gives you the opportunity to solder in the biasing resistors for the data lines because some USB power supplies require those to deliver the full current.

Looking now at some of the finer details, some of the finer design decisions. You can see we have rows labelled in increments of five. It's a free feature, why not? It can be helpful if someone is copying a circuit from say a fritzing diagram and they can just go off the coordinates. There are of course power rails that go down the sides of the breadboard but right down in the middle here between say where you would put a dip IC package is another set of rails that you can take advantage of. And they protrude by one additional row so that you can put your IC in place and you still have some power pads poking out if you want to deliver power right next to that IC.

Jumping into the schematic viewer, all the bussing is done on this the back layer and the front layer is just the pads. So you've got a bit of an opportunity there to solder say surface mount capacitors across buses or you know you can get away with soldering surface mount components between these pads. And if you really wanted to take advantage of surface mount components you could take to these rows with like a hobby knife or even a Dremel or something and cut those those rows so you can just create little copper lands to to land those pads for surface mount parts.

And this space at the bottom we're just keeping aside for a little bit of branding or a little bit of you know information, part numbers, links, etc. It can be a little tricky to, I mean on the screen it can be a little tricky to get an idea of scale. So here is a one-to-one print and I think that is that is suitable for a lot of projects. Man, you can fit a lot of circuit on this. Big but not too big. Now I'm not going to be so bold as to claim that this is the perfect protoboard but man I think it's definitely on its way. What features do you want to see in the perfect protoboard? What does the perfect protoboard mean to you? Are you all about the square pads, the circular pads, interconnects or just the grid? Let us know because we're going to be having a few variants coming out in the near future.

Now for a bit of a project update. A few episodes ago I mentioned a test jig for the PiicoDev Raspberry Pi adapter. So far I've been testing these by plugging them into a Raspberry Pi and actually checking that the connection is good to all the PiicoDev connectors by plugging real modules into it. That project kind of fell by the wayside but now as you can see we've done another whole production and so we've got to bring that project forward so that we can test these in time.

Peter's laid out the schematic and laid up the PCB. For just a reminder it's basically some GPIO expanders that are checking continuity and no crosstalk between these connectors. We're also going to use a Raspberry Pi Pico to drive the show. Up until this point test jigs have mostly been using Teensies but I think making the switch to Raspberry Pi Pico is a great idea. It's a fully featured device. It's got a lot of GPIO. It's written in Python so you don't have to worry about all the minutiae of memory management in C kind of goes away when you're using Python.So it may mean that we can develop these jigs and the test suites faster.

An update on the PiicoDev OLED module. The OLEDs have arrived. This is but one small brick of many trays of these OLED modules so we've got everything that we need to put these together and now we just need to figure out how to solder them. Here's a PiicoDev OLED module and it turns out Hakko actually produce a shovel-shaped soldering tip. I've been referring to this as a T-bar but they produce a specialized soldering tip that can solder this component. How serendipitous.

So we've also been continuing our discussion on jigging these two components together so that we can come in with that T-bar tip and solder this connector. One thing that I found quite interesting about this tip is it's unlike, now this is unlike any I've seen before. It actually goes into this rather unusual Hakko soldering wand, pencil, soldering handle where the heating element is inside the tip. If I disassemble the handle there are two ring contacts separated by this like high temperature plastic or ceramic material and these are the electrical contacts to heat the tip. I've never seen this before but it makes a lot of sense like in a traditional soldering iron where the heating element is fixed in the bar, how do you deliver heat all the way into this tip? But this handle is really just a tube with electrical contacts inside to make contact with this heating element.

And in any case, those are the updates that I have for you this week. If you have any suggestions for what you think would make the perfect proto board do let me know in the comments below and until next time, thanks for watching.