What is a Breadboard?

Author: Tyson Popynick   Date Posted:2 April 2016 

What is a breadboard?


A breadboard is a small board with lots of holes placed in a grid over its surface. Often they will have a power section, in which the pins running horizontally left and right will be linked. The main section of the board have rows linked, with a break in the middle of the board too.

This is hard to imagine, however once you see it visually it becomes much clearer. A simple image is shown on the right.

 

How do I use it?
The holes in the breadboard have been sized so that most components, ICs, modules, legs, pins and connectors will fit into the holes, and straddle the center of the board so you can access most of their features. This becomes very obvious the first time you place an IC onto the board, and notice how it exposes each pin nicely.

The red and blue represent the power rails, and the black shows the connections throughout the main section.

 

How does a breadboard work?
There are copper rails located inside the breadboard in such a pattern as to allow fast and easy layout and prototyping of circuits. They do not provide a very clean connection, although this is not important for most projects. (When you are trying to work with very small, fast or sensitive frequencies breadboards are generally not a good idea, but for almost any standard project they are perfect).

 

Useful Resources and Links:
Wikipedia

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