Do I need a breakout board for Arduino projects?What’s the usage of breakout board? And do you have some recommandations?
I hate bread boards and pin cables. I have wasted so much time figuring out at some point that a cable or the board was faulty (bad connections). Unless you buy expensive cables and board there is a good chance that a significant amount of parts will not work reliably.
I suggest you use a soldering iron. It is easy to learn and fun. These circuits are very reliable then.
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@neuro3en is talking about breadboards because often people like to first try a circuit out first on there before they solder. However, I’m a lot like @neuro3en and like to solder or use alligator clips to test circuits first. Breadboards can be confusing at first and sometimes the wires don’t make good connections to the parts you are trying to connect to Arduino. As for breakout boards–you might be talking about “proto” boards–the little boards that have holes where you can solder your own circuit. Sometimes there is not enough room on an Arduino to solder in the holes, or you may need more space for a part to rest. That is when this style of board is helpful. Sometimes breakout board can refer to an accessory board for Arduino that has connections to fit nicely–like a modular system. It would be hard to make recommendations because the use of these boards is very specialized. Some may help for special layout of LEDs, others may provide attachment for certain sensors–there are just so many types! Often a basic Arduino board has a lot of what you need until you want to keep things more tidy or add lots of components like displays and sensors. So, your project really determines what you will need. If you aren’t sure you can always post your idea here, or on forums for other sites like Adafruit or SparkFun. Those are good places to get some ideas. You can tell I <3 Arduino. :)
It all depends on your goal. If you want something fast that “just works”, the Sparkfun & Adafruit shields are great and they also provide libraries to make the coding easy. However if you want to learn how things work by following one of the many electronics tutorials out there, then an UNO/breadboard combination
->like the one we use with our undergrad students:
is really hard to beat in terms of flexibility as a learning tool. The key is choosing wire that is thick enough ( we use 22awg solid core) so that your wires make a good contact with the breadboard points. We also have the students add male dupont crimp pins to components with thin wires because some resistors, caps, LED’s etc. have really thin wires that will not make stable connections with a breadboard.
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Hi…i am a new user here. I have limited amount of components, so I don’t want to put a header on a breakout board, because I can’t take it off easily.Is there a way to use breakout board in a way so I can test connections, without headers? I can solder wires, but then I need to solder the wire to something that allow me to pin the wire to the breadboard.I am sure that someone found a better way to resolve the issue; can’t believe that prototyping involve solder permanently a header on a breakout board.
Thank you so much for this. I was into this issue and tired to tinker around to check if its possible but couldnt get it done. Now that i have seen the way you did it, thanks guys
with
regards