Operation Manual

This, among other reasons, is why the Raspberry Pi itself is built on a printed circuit board (PCB) rather than a breadboard—
although the breadboard method was certainly used in the early days of prototyping the device. It’s possible to print and etch
your own PCBs at home, but there is a simpler intermediate step you can take: using stripboard to create permanent stand-alone
circuits.
At first glance, stripboard looks similar to breadboard, because its surface is covered in small holes at 2.54 mm spacing. Unlike a
breadboard, however, there’s no clever mechanism for ensuring that electronic components placed into these holes stay in place
—instead, you’ll have to solder them onto the stripboard. Stripboard is often referred to by the trade name Veroboard, which is
a trademark of Vero Technologies in the UK and Pixel Print in Canada.
Creating a stripboard circuit has many advantages over using a breadboard. A sheet of stripboard is significantly cheaper than an
equivalently-sized breadboard, and it can be snapped to size for smaller circuits. This also allows a single, large piece of
stripboard to be used in the creation of several smaller, independent circuits.
Because components are soldered onto stripboard, it’s also significantly more robust than a breadboard prototype. A stripboard
circuit can be carried around from place to place with little risk that one of its components will become dislodged and lost. Figure
12-8 shows a piece of stripboard flipped to show the copper tracks on its underside.
Figure 12-8: The copper tracks on the underside of a piece of stripboard