Build electronic circuits with stripboard

Build electronic circuits with stripboard – it’s easy and can help you build effective circuits. The circuits we’ve shown on the website can be built with stripboard. 

Stripboard is a very useful prototyping circuit board and is idea for permanent assembly of hand built projects. The base material is SRBP which is tough and stands up well to soldering. Stripboard has copper tracks on one side with holes spaced 0.1” (2.54mm) apart. The pitch between hole spacing is common with many electronic components such as ICs, sockets and plugs. Should it be necessary to isolate components / connections on shared tracks it is easy to cut tracks. If your design features a DIL IC then one of the first actions will be to cut (break) the tracks between adjacent IC pins. This can be cleanly done with a craft knife or a small drill bit. 

When building electronic circuits with stripboard, it’s a good idea to work out the component layout. A sketch or drawing on squared paper that follows the boards matrix of holes and tracks should help. When starting this process it may be easier to start at a central circuit element such as an IC and then place the components around the IC whilst working out from this point. The layout drawing should also show all interconnecting wire links and track breaks. Generally, planning the layout will speed up assembly and assist fault finding. In the interests of saving money and materials it is better to keep the layout size small (if possible). This also ensures that stray capacitance, lead inductance and resistance are kept to a minimum. These issues should not be a problem for the projects shown here, but you might come across circuit designs, especially when venturing up the frequency range where component layout and assembly could be critical.