Circuit Construction
Saturday, 21 July 2018
6:48 PM
Always clear the breadboard of any old circuits before beginning to build a new circuit.

Exercise care in inserting and removing ICs. Pins are easily bent and jabbed into your fingers. 

Solder 22 A WG solid wire to the leads of components with large leads. 

Devise and carefully follow a colour code scheme for +V, -V, 0 V (common) and signal wires. The usual colour code is: 

RED: 
+V 

BLACK: 
-V 

GREEN: 
0 and/or EARTH 

Avoid jungles. Make all components lie flat. Trim and bend leads and wires to fit the layout. Neat, flat layouts work better and are far easier to troubleshoot than a jungle of components and wires. 

Do not forget to connect the power supplies to each IC. Although not always shown on a schematic, power is required by the ICs. This simple oversight is responsible for many lost hours of fruitless troubleshooting. 

Select one connector as the common point. Tie the breadboard’s 0 V rail, power supply common, and all test instruments’ earths to that single point. 

Insert suitable decoupling capacitors between the +V, -V supply rails and the 0 V (common) rail, preferably close to the power supply’s connection points to the rails. See the layout in Figure 3 for an example. 