Seeking wirewrap prototyping board
Bob Dang
After searching until near exhaustion, I cannot find an electronics
vender that sells a general purpose wire wrap prototyping board. My
specs call for a Wirewrap Board having female connectors on top to
plug chips and such into with male feedthrough pin posts on the
underside (~13.0 mm) with a grounding plane. It needs to be a board
that one could apply a wire wraping tool against the pole points on
the underside with some wire to create custom design circuits. It is
similar to a bread board, but the main difference being that the wire
connections are made on the underside of the board. Most of my general
searchs have turned up tons of "PCB/PWB layout service" shops, but no
actual part. If you could point me in the general direction...
Thanks,
-Bob
Tam/WB2TT
"Bob Dang" <msuck...@programmer.net> wrote in message
news:528ec373.04101...@posting.google.com...
I think Augat used to make these, but not many people wirewrap any more.
Tam
Joerg
Although I am not at all a fan of wire wrap and would not prototype with
it ever, I remember that this was the way it used to be done for boards:
You bought a normal experimenters board, ideally with a plane on top and
bottom, one for VCC and one for GND. Then sockets would be placed and
the corner pins (or whichever were supply and ground) were soldered to
the respective plane. That kind of held the socket in place. You could
also solder the other corners gently to the via for more rigidity,
making sure that no solder ever crept onto the wrap area of the posts.
That's why some people did this soldering from top.
The problem might be where to find these sockets with the long wrap
posts. They look like regular high quality machined IC sockets from the
top and have thick square posts at the bottom, about 3/4" or so in
length. In the early 80's you could buy them at any major distributor
but I haven't seen one in more than a decade. It may be necessary to
hunt for them on ebay or ask around this newsgroup. There are some folks
here who used to do a lot of wire wrap.
Regards, Joerg
CBarn24050
Tweetldee
Surf over to www.newark.com and search for WIREWRAP. They seem to stock a
fair assortment of prototyping boards. You might have to buy the blank
board and install your own sockets, but it appears that they have the best
stock of the major distributors.
--
Dave M
MasonDG44 at comcast dot net (Just subsitute the appropriate characters in
the address)
Never take a laxative and a sleeping pill at the same time!!
Rich Grise
<AOL>
Me, Too!
</AOL>
But here's some sockets:
http://www.sourceresearch.com/frontline-interconnect/103.cfm
One of the places where I worked used so many of the boards you're
describing that they were in stock, i.e., go to the parts counter and
have them issue one. :-) Augat was a big supplier, but as Tam/WB2TT wrote,
there's not a lot of market for wirewrap these days.
Good Luck!
Rich
Paul Burke
> Greets,
> After searching until near exhaustion, I cannot find an electronics
> vender that sells a general purpose wire wrap prototyping board.
The lost art of wire wrap. You can buy boards in Eurocard or (perhaps
still) double Euro size. They are matrix boards with just a pad for each
hole. Some also have a plane grid between the pads on one or both sides.
You buy the wirewrap sockets, though you have to use some ingenuity for
anything other than SIL and DIP packages. then wrap the connections,
plug the components in, debug and find that every single problem
requires almost complete unwiring of the board despite your strategic
wrap pattern, so that in theory any given change requires a maximum of
three connections changed.
The upside was that if a design worked in wirewrap, it would certainly
work when you got it on a PCB.
Paul Burke
Clarence
"Paul Burke" <pa...@scazon.com> wrote in message
news:2tju58F...@uni-berlin.de...
IF it was all Digital and modest clock rates!
Bob Dang
What are people using instead? It's been about four years since I used
one for a design. Also I think I remember the board had tiny caps
without leads attached to reduce the noise.
-Bob
Joerg
>>I think Augat used to make these, but not many people wirewrap any more.
>>
>>
>What are people using instead? It's been about four years since I used
>one for a design. ...
>
The good old soldering iron, solder, wire and a nice pair of strippers
(not the kind you see on some TV channels...). Another technique that I
like is wire that has an insulation that looks like shellac but isn't.
It melts when soldering. Needs good ventilation.
Actually this is the way I have done it for many decades, since age 12
or so. I don't believe in wire wrap. Never have.
> Also I think I remember the board had tiny caps
>without leads attached to reduce the noise.
>
>
Being an RF guy I have never used boards or sockets with built-in caps.
I wanted to know what performance my caps had. Also, the stuff with the
included caps was usually very expensive. It's like cooking where the
results are usually best when creating it all from scratch. More
healthy, too.
Regards, Joerg
John Fields
---
LOL... You don't have a clue!
--
John Fields
Tam/WB2TT
Bob,
The last few boards I have worked on have been 100 % surface mount. We had
tried adapters to map surface mount IC pins to some kind of through hole
pattern, but gave up on that at around 68 pins. You just make a PC board.
Didn't have any 14 or 16 pin ICs, because that was all in CPLDs. That
actually makes some changes simpler, because you just reprogram the CPLD on
the board - no socket required.
Tam
Paul Burke
> What are people using instead? It's been about four years since I used
> one for a design. Also I think I remember the board had tiny caps
> without leads attached to reduce the noise.
I go straight to PCB using PCB Pool. It's efficient both in time and
cost, as wirewrapping (except for the simplest of designs) takes an age,
and anyway you need expensive adapters for anything surface mounted,
which means most interesting components these days. It's a cruel trick
they've played on me, shrinking all the components just as my near
vision starts to weaken!
But anyway, going straight to PCB means I have most of the layout done
already when it comes to production.
Paul Burke
Tim Shoppa
Augat used to sell such boards pre-populated with DIP IC sockets etc.,
but I haven't seen those around in a while.
Vector 8007 and Vector 106P70-4 and Vector 106P180-4 have 0.1" grids w ground
planes, and you can insert DIP wire-wrap sockets in as you wish. Digi-Key,
Mouser, Allied, Newark, and other big catalog houses carry them. I always
preferred interleaved busses over a ground plane, myself.
Tim.
j.b. miller
guns,etc....
Located near Toronto,Ontario if you're nearby...
Jay