concept perfboard in category arduino

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Arduino in Action. Login to get full access to this book.

You might be wondering why the pins in the Arduino offset header (on the right in figure 12.10) are bent slightly. The answer is that the perfboard has a grid of small holes separated by 0.1 inches (2.54 mm), which is to say that the holes are laid out in 0.1 inch spacing. The Arduino doesn’t use 0.1 inch spacing. This is not out of malice or a desire to make you buy more shields—it was an error in a very early edition of the Arduino that, for compatibility reasons, has been preserved. The bent pins on the Arduino offset header allow you slide the pins into the Arduino’s pins REF and D8 or D7 and D0 and use non-bent pins to connect to the other digital pins on the Arduino. These offset header pins are available at several retailers, including Adafruit and SparkFun.

If you don’t want to buy bent pins or bend your own long pins, you have another option: take the perfboard and drill holes in between the existing holes so that they match up with the digital pins of the Arduino. To drill the holes you’ll need a 0.8 mm drill bit. You’ll then need to scrape away some of the copper from the sides of the board to avoid accidental shorts between pins. Figure 12.10 shows the holes carefully drilled in a piece of perfboard.

Figure 12.10. You can drill additional 0.8 mm holes into the perfboard if you don’t have prebent pins or don’t want to bend them yourself.