Side Quest: Breadboards – Why Cheap Ones Just Don’t Cut It

One quick aside before we dive into the LED bar: I’m not thrilled with my current breadboard. The button doesn’t sit as firmly as I’d like – it wobbles a bit and the connection is iffy, leading to falsely reported actuations.

At that point I remembered from back in the day when I made my MOS-6502 and Atari 8-bit Tutorials that Ben Eater had something to say about breadboard quality.

He tested loads of breadboards before settling on the high-quality BusBoard Prototype Systems BB830 ones for his kits. Turns out they’re not all the same at all! Cheaper ones often have weaker contacts that don’t grip components reliably, leading to exactly the sort of loose button issues I’m seeing. The quality of those contacts really makes a difference here.

So I’ve bitten the bullet and ordered a proper BusBoard BB830 from Mouser. Yes, it’s easily a factor of ten¹ more expensive than the board that came with the Freenove Kit. I can’t fault Freenove for it – adding a BusBoard BB830 to the kit would have made the breadboard the most expensive component, even pricier than the Raspberry Pi Pico included in some variants of the kit.

But wobbly buttons don’t make recording videos any easier. One hand holds the phone while the other presses the button… which promptly jumps out of the breadboard and ruins the shot. And because I film outside for better light, I might even lose the button for good on the lawn!

From my experience with Ben Eater’s 6502 Kit I know the contacts on a BusBoard really hold things tight. I won’t risk fishing lost components out of the grass. Solid hardware means fewer headaches and better tutorials. Next chapter’s LED bar will still use the old board – the new one takes a few days to arrive from the USA.

Speaking of international orders: for someone in Switzerland the real advantage of Mouser is that they take care of the import tax themselves and don’t rely on United Parcel Service or FedEx for handling. Both carriers slap on exorbitant handling charges that they pass straight on to the receiver – much higher than the US Postal Service, which lets Swiss Post manage the import. Swiss Post does a cracking job, but Mouser sorting it all without any extra fee is even better.

I’ve gone for the transparent BB830T this time – I hope it’ll look rather smart on camera and let you see how the wires snake underneath. For the Pico’s 3.3 V logic I’ve also ordered extra power rails (sadly not transparent). I’ll make the best of it by using the clear board for 5 V and the opaque one for 3.3 V.

I also ordered a few bits for other projects: a WD65C816 (plus bus driver), a WD65C51 (plus RS232 driver), and a handful of NAND, AND and NOT gates for some advanced address-decoder logic. When my 6502 breadboard computer finally gets Microsoft BASIC we’ll need all the RAM we can get!

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That’s ten times for non-nerds, and it really is a factor of ten. A proper BusBoard BB830 costs 8.50 Francs at Mouser.ch while the cheapest AliExpress generics go for just 80 Rappen.