Planning Your Stripboard or Perfboard Layout

One popular use case for Circuit Canvas is to use it as a tool for planning how to layout the components on a stripboard or perfboard before soldering.

Before, I used to place some of the main components physically on the board, then try to imagine the different connections. This was quite the mental exercise, took time, and didn't always result in a good layout.

With Circuit Canvas, I can now place the components virtually, and draw any manual connections needed. This way I can plan out where to place the components without touching - or even before ordering the components.

Planning a Stripboard Layout

Here's the schematic for a project I did for my daughters toy kitchen. It was a LED light strip that she could turn on and off, simply by placing her hand near the light.

First I built a prototype on a breadboard, just to test the idea and make sure it was viable. Once that worked, I started planning out a simple stripboard layout:

I soldered it up, and it worked straight away (which is rare!). 

Then I tried installing this in the toy kitchen. But I realized that soldering the IR LED and the phototransistor to the board made the placement of it a bit clunky. 

I decided to make the IR LED and photosensor its own sensor module that could be connected to the board instead. This way, I would have more freedom to place the sensor wherever I wanted, independent of the board.

Planning a Perfboard Layout

First, I cloned my project to create a separate project for version 2 of this board. 

I wanted to turn my protoboard into an Arduino shield that could be plugged on top of the Arduino. So I decided perfboard would be the best choice.

First, I removed all the wires by selecting them all (Alt-W), then pressing "Delete". Then I removed the Stripboard and added a Perfboard instead from the component chooser.

Then it was just about moving the components around and finding a good placement for them all.

When using perfboards, it's common to add solder bridges between the "islands" in order to create connections internally on the board without wires. To do this, I used the "wire" functionality of Circuit Canvas, and set the color to something I would remember as being solder bridges. In this case, orange matched the islands on the board nicely.

Using the text function (pressing "T"),  I added some text to help me remember the location of the Arduino pins and sensor cabling.

The Final Toy Kitchen

Finally, I soldered up everything and installed it in the toy kitchen.

Here's a short video showing the final project installed in my daughters toy kitchen:

Summary

Planning out your stripboard or perfboard layout becomes super easy with Circuit Canvas.

Start with a schematic. Then go over to "Layout Mode", remove the standard breadboard and instead add a perfboard or a stripboard. Then add all your components and try different placements until you find one that works well and requires as few wires as possible.