I love the BB830s that Ben Eater recommends

The incredible amount of insertion force required on cheap, no-name breadboards is my main beef and that of many Amazon reviewers.

Your comments on Ben Eater style breadboard computers is exactly what I would've said. Any chance of a single wire coming loose or a bad connection that can't be traced, and you're sitting there for ages trying to figure out why it's not working. Not to mention the headaches of storage, making sure that it's not subjected to movement or humidity that might cause corrosion. The self inflicted pain tends to overshadow the novelty factor. But no question it helps to explain the concepts in his tutorials and he does a good job of it.

I use the same 3M breadboard I've had for years. They're really good but insanely pricey.

When you said that these came from Radio Shack, it just reminded me of the MANY items I bought from them down thru the years. I can honestly say that of all the stuff I bought, maybe only a handful of items turned out to be less than desireable in quality. I really miss being able to go downtown to the Radio Shack store and picking up stuff for my projects ! At least they have a website, so I guess that's better than nothing.

Watch out for some older breadboards whose metal interconnects are just a common U-Channel rail without individualised finger connects for each hole. The issue with these is if an adjacent wire/pin of a slightly larger size is inserted it opens then clip wider and can cause the existing connections to become unknowingly & unwantedly disconnected.

For the Christmas holidays I got BB830 breadboard from BusBoard Prototype Systems after seeing it on a video. Oh wow, better than anything I used in the past. They can accept wide pins and narrow wire. I just checked and they have just come back in stock so stock so I placed an order for more. Never new I needed this until I found it.

The "word-salad" in the description is probably to hit more searches.

Do you remember back in the 80's almost all of the solderless breadboards were better than that MB-102, but the good quality ones had gold plated contact springs?

Ben uses BusBoard brand bread boarda. They are SO WORTH it. Cheap chinesium boards are only good for 20 AWG leads or holding headers for solding. I have found that Chinese products where the company name is part if the mold are pretty good. Hate the foam tape, remove it and use nice thick heavy duty packing tape. I ised to do wire install. Nobody back pulls the 50 pair, I did. Gave my professor 10 one foot bundles, still have some still in the jadket, hand wound up 10 foot rolls, and used short bits for twist ties all from 1993.

51:50 It's certainly true that the shorter wires are far more useful than the longer wires. I've been buying these things for 20 years, and the ones that get used up are the short ones.

Great video, thank you

Two boards with a double-row between are not 1/10" spacing, and actually about half a hole off. So I removed the double between the two rows and used another perf-board with pegs to space them perfectly apart, then tacked them down. Now I have a space between but run wires up the center to keep my builds very clean. ---- Some boards are Nickle plated, some are just cheap metal.. if it doesn't say Nickle, Silver, or Gold plated it's NOT. Found out many years ago that these do NOT work for RF experiments, but have built complete processors on them.

I use those power binding posts all the time. I pre-wire them to the power rails and it's super easy to hook up one or more bench supplies :)

One thing I hate about these breadboards is when using them with 0.6 inch or wider DIP/DIL packages where most of the connection holes are made useless by being covered up. Another bugbear is the abnormal spacing between the power rail holes and the standard holes requiring some mods/bends/kinks to pre-cut wires.

Exactly! A few months ago, I went through the very same frustration. I had bought some of the multiple breadboard things like yours, but of the cheap Chinese variety. Couldn't figure out why my circuit wasn't working, until I realized that one of the pins wasn't getting power. Couldn't figure out why that was, until I realized that the connector in the breadboard ... was missing. But this wasn't even my biggest complaint. On closer inspection, most, if not all of the connectors did not close completely, meaning: for most parts the connection was 'probably' okay, but with thin wires (like those on a cheap 1/4 Watt resistor), there may not be any connection at all. At first, I tried taking them apart and bending the connectors so they would at least close properly, but this was looking like a daunting task, with dubious returns. Frustration was mounting. So, I looked around for some better breadboards. This time, I was less interested in price than I was in reviews and recommendations. Ben Eater, (the king of breadboards), recommends (and sells) something called BB830 from 'Busboard Prototype Systems (BPS)' These are relatively economical high quality boards. By "relatively" I mean they sell on Amazon.ca for $11 CAD/board, about 3-4 times the price of the cheap Chinese junk, (but not $120 that 3M charges for the same thing!) ... and they just work. They also have a website, probably a service department, and they say all of the things I want to hear. So, I bought 8 of these. (They also have BB400, BB1460 etc.) Jumper wires: I have LOTS of the Dupont jumper wires like those you show, but these are stiff, hard to work with, and prone to fail, especially the short ones. Having spent all that money on my nice breadboards, I could see that I needed a better solution for jumper wires ... but nothing online impressed me. So I made my own. I bought some 26 AVG Silicone wire. This typically comes in boxes with 5 colours, 10 meters each. But, there are different colour sets available, so I bought 2 different sets giving me 10 colours. I purchased a crimping tool and tons of Dupont male/female connectors. I even bought the gold plated ones. Then I spent literally about 3 days making hundreds of proper jumper wires, in the 3 configurations, mostly short but also some longer wires, having first tinned all the ends. It was a LOT of work and expense, but these are super flexible, easy to work with on breadboards, and much nicer than any of the crap available online. Now I can concentrate on my electrical projects. I also similarly made a lot of probe wires for my logic analyzer, better than the crap which came with it. I guess you get what you pay for.

I was in the market to get a few of those breadboards a few months ago. As Fry's was closed, I turned to Amazon. After seeing what was there and seeing the negative reviews, I just went over to Ben Eater's site and ordered some of ones on his shop since he stated he had tried several and found some acceptable ones. They are not superior like the old ones, but they are, indeed, more than acceptable.

Every breadboard I have used has the power rails, then 5 holes connected vertically. Is it possible to get one with the vertical rows a bit longer? Eight holes would solve all problems, but even six would be a huge improvement.

Do a search for Global Specialties and check under Products, Solderless Breadboards, Singles. I purchased some a few months ago and have found them to be quite good. They don't sell direct but do list vendors.

Unlike you I find the banana posts handy for a couple of reasons: A) Quick connect and disconnect to lab power supplies with banana posts. B) It prevents unwanted tugs on the power supply leads to pull out from the breadboard.

What is your opinion of Jameco or Mouser ?

Are the $85 3M breadboards overkill?

I had plans for that, but I never... Yeah, I did a lot of those -

where is the positive and negative?