About this video
This video shows how to build a mounting spacer for a breadboard on a Bit-zee bot prototype. A cork block is cut and filed to the height of the Arduino's power and USB connectors, then hot-glued onto the board. The breadboard's double-stick tape is exposed only where it will touch the cork and the connectors, so the breadboard is held level above the components without shorting anything.
You'll be able to
- choose a non-conductive spacer whose height matches the connectors it must clear.
- explain why the cork is trimmed slightly oversize and then filed to size.
- plan where to remove a protective backing so an adhesive only contacts the intended surfaces.
Key words
- Breadboard
- A board with holes and clips that lets you build and change circuits without soldering.
- Spacer
- A piece of material placed between two parts to hold them at a set distance.
- Non-conductive
- A material that does not carry electric current, so it will not short out circuits.
- Double-stick tape
- Adhesive tape with a protective paper backing that must be removed before sticking.
- Surface-mount component
- An electronic part soldered directly onto the surface of a circuit board.
Transcript
So to be able to do some hardware prototyping on our Bit-zee bot, we're going to put the center section of a bread board on top of Arduino. We need to connect it to something so we're looking at maybe using a wine cork to put between the surface mount components here on the Arduino board.
The cork is non-conductive and it's pretty easy to cut so I figured that might be a good way to connect the board. And so we need to find the height of our power connector and our USB connector. And they happen to be the same height. So we can cut our wine cork down to the right size.
And we're just trimming the rough edge off here with a hacksaw blade. And I actually should be doing that on top of a scrap piece of wood so we'll move it to there just so we don't scar up the table when we get to the bottom of it. And you can see the cut's not perfectly straight.
So in order to fix that, we're going to cut the cork just a little bit larger than we need it to be. And it's close to two centimeters there. And then we're going to take the cork and file it down and get it nice and smooth. And the file will let us take off just a little bit at a time so we can get it just the exact right height.
Now that we have the cork the right size, we're going to squeeze out a blob of hot glue that's about the size of a dime. And we're going to push our cork down on the center of it. And so that way the cork is going to be able to support our bread board. Now when I did this, I realized that the cork was to far over and it's actually obscuring some of the numbers.
It's covering over some of the numbers that I need to be able to see. So I was able to trim a little bit of it off with the break off blade knife. And apparently cutting through the grain structure of the cork in this direction works pretty well with the knife.
So in order to get it lined up just right, just trimming off the edge there to make it just a little cleaner. And then there's a little bit of hot glue left at the bottom. So to clean that off, I'm just going to score it and then take a screwdriver and peel it up.
So now we have our connection. And it looks like our bread board will be pretty well supported. And there's a double-stick tape on the back of the bread board that's got a paper coating over the top of it. So we need to remove that paper coating or paper cover to expose the double-stick tape and allow us to stick the bread board down.
So we're just removing that coating, the paper coating or paper covering. We're only removing it in the sections where we know it's going to touch the cork, the USB connector, and the power adapter connector. And once we have that lined up, we'll just take our bread board and press it into place.
And this is going to allow us to change out different components like resistors and capacitors and transistors and allow us to do some different configurations and experiments with the Bit-zee bot.
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