Wiring best practice -photos please

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bLackburst

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I'd love to see how everyone physically wires their projects so I can do it in the neatest way, especially for projects with a number of I/O. There's a world of breakouts, protoshields, adapters, perfboards, connectors but I'd like to see what has worked best for you with the Teensy pin config and pick up some tips along the way. I struggle choosing connectors for a modular setup too. It would be great to keep the posts photo-heavy or at least concise in regards to wiring advice for future beginners. Thanks!
 
On many of the library documentation pages, you can see how I've wired up various prototypes.

For example:

td_libs_Matrix_backside.jpg


Lately, I've been doing more PCB prototypes with OSH Park. It takes a couple weeks to get the PCB, but much less time soldering.
 
whatever happened to prototyping with wire-wrap? I spent a gazillion hours doing that. 5 seconds to add a wire. Pre-stripped, electric gun. Manual twisty-wrapper was about 15 seconds.

About 30 seconds to remove and re-route and re-wrap.

http://www.jameco.com/jameco/workshop/techtip/wirewrap.html
http://www.techni-tool.com/Wire-Wrap-Guns


In my job, we had hourly workers from the factory come and wire wrap. Good ones. They could work with a schematic and a wire-wrap gun. They loved to get upstairs and work in the labs.
 
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For various reasons that made sense at the time have done a number of prototypes by home etching a single sided board to get all my connectivity arranged in ways to makes the wiring simple using IDC headers and plugs. Cost effectiveness of this is highly questionable, but makes the soldering stage less tedious and can turn an idea into blinking lights in an afternoon.

Otherwise tend to use various flavors of strip board or even dead bugging components legs up and using soldered wire wrap wire to connect them.

Was actually taught to wire wrap, and repaired it on occasion but never had a project for which it would have been the right hammer for the job to prototype with
 
Wire wrap assembly, at least the stuff I've worked with is more about wiring plug to plug, than component to component. So you'd make a bunch of generic modules that fitted a standard socket with wire wrap pins on them and then sit down with the wiring plan and connect everything up internally, and to the outside plugs.

The actual modules were normally still PCB, though some of those look odd to modern eyes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printed_circuit_board#Cordwood_construction
 
I use wirewrapping for most things. I find I can twist 4 30ga wirewrap wire and it makes a pretty robust cable, for example, connecting Teensy to i2c or a serial.
Hand or gun wirewrap tools are available. I find that as long as there are sufficient turns, the wirewrap works with the break-away headers. I would like to use 28ga in some circumstances but can't seem to locate 28ga wire wrap wire.
 
Wirewrap was great when using DIP ICs and sockets, or breadboards with hundreds of holes for DIPs and sockets with wire wrap pins.
We used wire wrap "panels"
https://www.google.com/search?q=wir...s3Ehz7x0M:&usg=__inBI_Bi8f1gAmUU9LGQAKXJyVoM=

And we had a computer controlled wire wrap machine. It was pretty fast!
We used this setup to build low volume specialized computers... One that I remember was the first process control computer for network television's program switching (on CBS). Another was for huge parking lots in NYC. And we did some for big oil refineries' process control.

As an early DIY project at home, I designed/built an 8 bit "computer" that used TTL chips and a 40 pin Arithmetic and Logic (ALU) chip. On a wire wrap panel with about 100 ICs. Instruction set was implemented with NAND/NOR gates. Memory was shift registers - DRAM was costly/complex. Assembler written on company's computer, in FORTRAN. Then this homebrew bootstrapped itself to be able to compile its own assembler, editor. Steve Wozniak was doing similar things at the time. Hmmm. I took the wrong road somewhere.
 
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