Page 20 - Make Your Own PCBs with EAGLE from Schematic Designs to Finished Boards

FIGURE 1-5 A breadboard prototype.

The main advantage of a solderless breadboard is that it’s, well, solderless. Thus you can quickly
and easily change the design just by unplugging components and leads as you need to. The
disadvantage is that wires can fall out and leads of components can touch, so a breadboard is only
good for the first pass of a prototype. It probably would not be wise to deploy a breadboard-built
design for real use. Eventually, something would work loose, and the prototype will stop working.

For something more durable as a prototype, there is really no substitute for soldering.
The other disadvantage of breadboard is that the layout is fixed, so components end up very
spaced out from each other, often with a large number of jumper wires linking everything together.

Perfboard

Perfboard (perforated board) is one of a number of types of board designed specifically for
prototyping. It is made from the same material as a PCB but has no copper on it. It is just a board with

an array of holes in it on a 0.1-in. grid (Figure 1-6).