Hello all, I am building H-Bridges and am currently just soldering wires onto the IC's and MOSFETs. I feel like I will have to continue soldering onto the MOSFETs just because I am pulling a fair amount of current through them ~20A, but I keep breaking the pins off of my driver IC's.
I bought some prototyping boards from Amazon but they are not very user friendly, you have to solder jumpers in between the holes and I end up with huge solder puddles joining them together. Prototyping Boards
I found Veroboard but I don't have any experience with it. VeroBoard
I also found "solderable" breadboards at Adafruit. Perma-Proto
Learn to use Eagle and get your boards made by OSH Park (in the USA - I don't know any suppliers outside the US.)
Once you see how quickly you can get a custom board and how easily your components fit to it, you won't go back to protoboard. I've switched to using as much surface-mount as possible.
I use veroboard for most things. I even use it with surface mount parts, you can solder passive components between the tracks or across a hole break. The trick is to remove the track with a scalpel. I have even used 0.05" pitch IC using the scalpel to split the track lengthways between the holes to double the pitch.
Yep strip board is great you can do about anything you want with it kind of brings back the point to point stuff I seen as boy and did but the parts are smaller now way smaller I've solder stuff unbelievable small with hair size wire just takes time is all.
The best thing is to plan how it will fit first then solder your parts. Draw it out always worth the time saved later.
And as far as breaking pins go glue the chip to the side and solder your wires if you have to it gives backing to the pins so your not bending them and snapping them off.
You can get solder pins that fix securely to the strip board then solder onto that. Note however you will not get a track to carry more than half an amp or so. After that re force the tracks with tinned copper wire. Look at the hardware section of my website for examples of my projects non of which use a PCB.
I've soldered #12 wire to track after fixing my parts to it. But the trick is planning it out so you have room to run your power out .
I made a dryer broad that controlled the motor and the gas. With coin reader to set the on time It worked out nice. I posted a pic some where here it counting the coins.
I find solderable-breadboard to be the fastest and easiest type of through-hole prototyping board (vs perf-board and strip-board). I had some prototyping board made that has a mix of SMD outlines and solderable-breadboard on it, to make it easy to prototype projects with SMD devices. I've been really happy with it - projects go together really fast, and can be kept fairly tidy if you're neat about the wiring.
For things that you're going to be making multiples of, once the design is settled, I definitely recommend designing a dedicated board; it's really not that hard.
That is really beautiful. My soldering skills and equipment forbid surface mount at the moment. But that is a beautiful board. I honestly only need 5 h-bridges built and due to high current I'm not sure having boards produced for my needs is the way to go. I really only have 10 ICs and 20 MOSFETS and the FETs are going to have huge heatsinks, so I think "solderable" breadboard is my best bet, ICs, resistors, a few caps and that's pretty much it.
