Board Variants

My earliest PCBs were little more than perf boards, a matrix of pads on boards that fit into a readily available enclosure. They developed into prototyping boards that provided a degree of flexibility in developing the foundations for specific applications. While I still try to build in a degree of flexibility into all of my more recent boards, they are invariably now customised for specific applications. Nonetheless, my general approach of using 'board stacks' continues to provide a degree of modularity and thus reusability of individual components.

I've organised the presentation of the various PCBs here in groups associated with the individual enclosures for which they've been designed. Some of the 100 × 68 boards nonetheless include stack mount holes for 85 × 58 boards that allow them to be configured in a stack with an 85 × 58 processor board.

My Adaptor Boards are universal, in the sense that they are designed to plug into any appropriately sized, standard header. They are effectively used to reorder the pins on a header.

Individual Daughter Boards are designed to support a specific function in a modular fashion. They are a development of my prototyping boards in that, instead of switching functionality in and out of a circuit with DIP switches or solder jumpers, features can be added as required by plugging in an appropriate daughter board. This had the added advantage that the relevant circuitry no longer needed to be hard-wired into a new prototype, saving on component wastage and simplifying the prototype testing cycle.

In the very beginning, I started by just using the ALF4all board system developed by Wijnand Nijs (unfortunately, his website seems to have disappeared, so the background to his work appears to have been lost). When I progressed to making my own boards, my original Processor Boards were just versions of his ALF4all boards, employing the same, common 'sandwich' interface, which allowed me to experiment with different MCUs on a common base platform.