The New Breadboard

Just a quick note about breadboarding in the new Make: More Electronics book. For this new book, author Charles Platt chose to use a different breadboard design. This one has a single column of holes running down the left and right sides of the breadboard. The reasoning here (and I'm in agreement) is that having the traditional two columns (one red, one blue) running down both sides of a traditional breadboard can cause confusion for novices (and pros) as they wire up schematics. I know that I've fallen into the trap of inserting a wire into the wrong location many times.

Charles also points out that this breadboard layout also matches most designs of perfboard, so transferring a breadboarded project to perfboard is even easier.


In my quick searches, I was unable to find this type of breadboard locally, but I did manage to find them at a decent price on eBay per Charles' recommendation. I purchased three of them because I have a feeling I'll be wiring up multiple projects at once or possibly debugging a previous experiment while moving on to another one.

Here's a link to the one I bought - http://www.ebay.com/itm/310853041881

The price is $5.89US and the seller tosses in a 65 piece jumper wire set -- and I can always use more jumper wire. Shipping was cheap, too $0.79US each.

If you find this type of breadboard locally or at a cheaper price, please share in the comments so other readers can obtain one or more at the lowest price possible. It's quite possible that MakerShed may eventually offer up a Parts Pack for the new book (as they did with the first book) that might include this type of breadboard, but right now I've heard nothing about a Parts Pack being considered.