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Perfboard is kind of a PCB minus, and recently Aron Nelson suggested that all it really needs is a way to "paint" traces on the bottom, especially if you have the kind of perfboard with pad-per-hole copper. There are a few ways to do this.

 

Conductive paint There exist paints and epoxies loaded with so much silver powder that they conduct fairly well. They're normally used for repairing traces on real PCB's. However, you can also just paint traces with them. Solder-through wire There are some wires with insulation that decomposes at soldering temperatures. You can simply route the wires around the perfboard, wrapping the wire around leads where there's a solder connection, and then use your soldering iron to solder the connections when you're done. The catch is that it's hard to find the special wire. Poly-thermal-ese magnet wire is one type, and you might find some types of wire-wrap wire that work as well. Sticky-backed copper tape If you have access to sticky-backed copper tape, you can cut narrow strips and route it around on the bottom of the perfboard from pad to pad, and then solder.

Stripboard

You can think of stripboard as perfboard on steroids. One side of the perfboard is covered in printed circuit traces all running parallel in one dimension. All the holes along one strip would be connected together if you just poked wires through the board and soldered. The whole trick to stripboard is preliminary layout. You place components and dual in line PCB Assembly IC's on the blank, non-strip side perpendicular to the parallel runs of strip on the bottom/soldering side. You use the strips as side-to-side printed circuit wiring, and cut the strips apart where you don't need holes connected together. This way, the pre-printed strips can be used for a great deal of the interconnections, and the components themselves make many of the between-strips connections. Jumper wires do the rest. Stripboard is much easier to replicate than perfboard, as there's much less "arts and crafts" manual bending and forming needed to make a second copy. About the only disadvantages of stripboards for protoyping is that they're less modifiable than perfboard, as you had to cut those strips, which customizes the layout of the board, and they're inevitably going to be bigger in physical size than either well-laid-out perfboard or PCB for the same circuit, as really using the strips well necessarily means placing parts in a less compact layout than either perfboard or PCB.

 

Printed Circuit Board

Depending on what you're doing, PCB's are either the King or his evil twin. PCB's are not good for prototyping at all, as the circuit is already cast in concrete in the more-or-less intricate interconnections printed on the board. In fact, it's a bit foolish to waste the time making a printed circuit board for a circuit that you have not already tested and know that additional components are not needed.

 

However, if you're making your second (or third, or fifty-seventh) copy of a circuit, PCB's are a godsend. PCB's were invented explicitly for making hundreds - or millions! - of copies of circuits that come out right first time, every time. PCB's have the highest possible component density of all the circuit building techniques, and the highest chance of making successful electronic assembly copies, as all the guesswork about what to connect to what is gone.