Solderless breadboards are not usually used as the basis for permanent projects, but once the reader has gained some practical experience by breadboarding some of the projects, he or she should have little difficulty in building the projects on stripboard or using some other constructional method.

The components employed in the designs in this book are virtually all quite common types that are much used in home- constructor designs, and any “left-overs” should prove useful as a stock of components for future use. Similarly, the bread¬ board should be useful for experimenting with simple designs other than those featured in this book, and is likely to receive many years of heavy use.

The term “breadboard” is one that is likely to be a little confusing to beginners, but it simply means a board on which electronic circuits can be built and tested. Modern breadboards are almost invariably of the solderless type, where components are simply plugged in and unplugged as desired. Apart from the obvious advantage of enabling circuit changes to be rapidly made when experimenting, it also enables components to be reused almost indefinitely.

Components will in fact eventually wear out because the leadout wires will need to be reformed slightly to fit into new layouts, and the leadout wires eventually suffer from metal fatigue and break off (usually close to the body of the component so that it becomes useless). This can be overcome though by only using components for breadboarding for a limited period of time, and then using them in finished projects and getting a new stock of bread boarding components.