EP1000

Veroboards / Stripboards

A Veroboard is a brand of stripboard, which is a pre-formed circuit board material of copper strips on an insulating bonded paper board. The stripboard was designed in the 1980s to provide a fast way of prototyping electronic circuits. Ref: Wikipedia Veroboards

The alternative to stripboards is to use electronic breadboards, however, these suffer from stray capacitance and loose connections.

A stripboard allows you to securely solder your components and circuit for testing and measurment. The stripboard, however, has the following problems

• gets complex when circuits become bigger
• difficult to troubleshoot with complex wiring
• requires soldering (may have short circuits)

Designing stripboard layouts

Sometimes the best way of designing stripboard is by hand. The technique is as follows:

1. Print out a stripboard template
2. Use pencil and eraser and design your layour
3. Ink your design and verify it
4. Implement it on a stripboard.

You can find a number of printable templates by using Google. Here are a few quick locations:

• Electronics in Mechano
• Rick Murray Tempalte

There are software / methods of designing the layout using a computer and simple software, here are 2 common methods

• Using Microsoft Paint
• Using a Spreadsheet Excel/OpenOffice Calc this is my preferred choice for simple circuits

You can always choose the sophisticated method by using special software

• Fritzing which checks your schematic design against the circuit layout
• A list of Stripboard design software

A good reference for circuit prototyping can be found on the Best Soldering site.

Updated: January 2021