2/2/2026 at 6:57:34 AM
I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board. Certainly tastes are individual and like any skill worth practicing, you do get better at it... but it's just such a miserable way to work. IMO, again.Not only can you now order a real PCB for under $10, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could just buy extremely large pre-cut wire kits and treat them as the consumables that they truly are.
I'd rather go back to wire-wrapping. Every time I think "this is a great opportunity to use up a proto board!" I end up covered in flux goo and wondering what on earth I was thinking.
The real problem with proto board is what happens when you inevitably need to change your circuit. Again, it's miserable and suddenly your perceived speed gains are simply gone.
I think that the most exciting thing in prototyping right now is Stephen Hawes experiments with a) creating a PCB with premade vias that can be used to prototype anything and b) using a fiber laser to make your own PCBs.
Truly one of the most inspiring creators today.
by peteforde
2/2/2026 at 10:06:13 AM
Yes, wire-wrapping is/was so great. Really good quality connections, no accidental connections due to solder ending up at the wrong places, easy to remove or change.And no solder-iron that risks burning stuff. And no smoke either.
The only draw-back is that it seems to be so expensive and almost non-existant today.
by flakeoil
2/2/2026 at 12:30:24 PM
Burning stuff isn't a problem when soldering. It sounds like you need a little equipment upgrade. Get a holder for your soldering iron, and a fume extractor (filtered fan).by direwolf20
2/3/2026 at 1:34:49 PM
I wasn't mainly thinking about the actual soldering process, although that can also be an issue with small components or when not focusing on where the iron touches while reading a schwematic. But more like when the solder iron is stuffed back in the holder and something else gets pushed against it or when I get stuck in the solder iron's power cable and the solder iron is pulled out of its holder. I guess with more space, less junk on the table and the power cable fixed somewhere would help, but still, it's an annoyance.I would prefer holding a wire-wrapping pistol than an iron.
by flakeoil
2/2/2026 at 5:43:39 PM
I'm just surprised that my blog post from almost 6 years ago suddenly made it to the HN front page...That said: only when I need it the same day and it's not too complicated will I use protoboard. Otherwise it's JLCPCB every time, even if it's just a small debug interface board. I recently bought a cheap wire-wrapping tool and that's so much faster than messing around with enamel wire.
The board that is featured in this blog post was the first prototype of a skunkworks design for work that was on the shelves of Best Buy 7 months later. It was started just a week or two before COVID shutdown. I created PCBs soon after. Another month or 2 later and you'd have had a really hard time getting any PCB out of JLCPCB due to the supply chain disruption.
by tverbeure
2/2/2026 at 7:34:51 PM
This is a blog post that I would love to read. Seriously.Tell this story!
by peteforde
2/2/2026 at 8:52:41 PM
Maybe after I retire. :-)by tverbeure
2/2/2026 at 7:38:48 AM
While I agree with you about protoboards (especially the non-strip kind, which seem to be the predominant ones nowadays), I feel like, for anything but the most trivial circuit, drawing the schematic in CAD, picking footprints, laying out a board, doing paper printouts for verification and sending it off to a manufacturer is easily a full working day or more. It also runs the risk of scope creep -- your quick and dirty prototype suddenly turns into "a product" and you start thinking about form factor and enclosures and extra features.And over a week later when your minimum order quantity arrives, you discover your mistake and can add five more boards to the junk pile...
UV laser exposure feels like the correct way to go about doing small scale prototyping imho.
by kilpikaarna
2/2/2026 at 8:34:28 PM
Yeah! What is the deal with the shift to non-strip protoboards? If you're going to work like that, why on earth wouldn't you want to at least start with the assumption that you're going to need to connect things?The thing that really gets me is when I see designs on non-strip protos that involve the creator drawing a bead of solder across multiple holes to form a really unreliable wire. It's like they spent time using red stone in Minecraft and brought that instinct to electronics.
As for your larger point... I hear you - especially on the scope creep. However, it's distinctly possible that there's a realistic minimum time commitment to certain things we want to accomplish in life that are worth doing. If I have an idea for a little amp circuit or something, maybe the right thing to do is to make my best effort in KiCAD, spend that afternoon, measure everything twice... then not think about it for a week. Maybe that's when you jump into Fusion and whip up that quick enclosure.
Maybe the antidote to "slop" is that anything worth doing is worth that bit of attention. A product for one customer.
Otherwise, the solution is likely still the trusty and small drama solderless breadboard.
by peteforde
2/3/2026 at 7:18:39 AM
Wire-wrapping is awesome but proper sockets are expensive as hell. And changing a circuit on a real PCB is even more of a hell.by tliltocatl
2/2/2026 at 8:10:26 AM
If you want to play around now and with little preparation, there's no beating proto-boards. No toying around with designing the PCB, no waiting for the order. They're also great to practice your soldering skills.Sometimes you just want a sandwich, not to bake bread
by close04
2/2/2026 at 12:30:48 PM
Solderless breadboards for playing around, aren't they?by direwolf20
2/2/2026 at 1:18:54 PM
It depends if your application can deal with the capacitance. Anything above ~10-30 MHz is an exercise in futility.by nxobject
2/2/2026 at 7:05:19 AM
Any recommendations on pre-cut wiring kits?by michaeljx
2/2/2026 at 8:55:02 PM
Yes, actually!Depending on the complexity/situation/mood/need for permanence I use some combination of double-headed (male) jumper wire and pre-cut breadboard wires. I buy my jumper wire as tear-off ribbons because sometimes I need 14 in a row for a GPIO bank or similar.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005202872082.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003219096948.html
Jumper wires are the fastest and easiest to work with, but as complexity grows things quickly get out of hand visually and spatially.
Pre-cut wires are great, though I have some hot takes. First, for a long time I would carefully remove them from previous projects for reuse. I now believe that this is objectively bad because they grow brittle and become harder to re-insert. Instead, think of them like sandpaper, which has an obvious point of diminishing return. Throw them away as you use them up and order more when you're running low.
My main beef with pre-cut wires is that for reasons that anger me every time I think about it, they all come in lengths that increment by one 2.54mm unit up until about 10 lengths, at which point they start jumping to arbitrary lengths. So you end up either a) using two wires to cover a distance or b) with an overly long wire that you need to manage.
by peteforde
2/2/2026 at 7:12:18 PM
> I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board.I didn't understand your comment until I looked at the pictures in the article. To me "proto board" has always meant wire-wrapping. I lost count of how many of my designs back in the dark ages started as wire-wrapped protoboards. CPU cards, drive controllers, memory cards, motor drivers, keypads, I/O cards and myriad other projects.
In fact, I still have my OK Industries wire-wrapping gun[0]. I still have pins, sockets, boards, wire, etc. I probably reach for them once every couple of years these days. On those rare occasions when it's the middle of the night or a weekend and I have to wire-up a small board (nothing substantial). It's fast and works well for the right kind of project.
The problem with wire-wrap (and breadboards) is that, once clock frequencies (or frequencies in general in analog designs) rise the capacitive and inductive effects quickly conspire against you and make it impossible to build circuits that work. This is where the OP's approach can provide a bit of a bridge between a full PCB and wire-wrap/breadboard. I have done hand-wired (just like the article) boards with twisted pairs and carefully routed point-to-point connections. I never used magnet wire, just kynar or teflon wire-wrap wire.
[0] Mine is exactly like the one in figure 4 in this article. It works with spools of wire and auto-strips as you wire a board. It is very fast. Not sure why the article shows pre-stripped wire, the tool does the work for you auto-magically. I didn't read the article, maybe they are using a bit that does not strip (why?).
https://www.nutsvolts.com/magazine/article/wire_wrap_is_aliv...
by robomartin
