When I was young, dot-matrix printers were the height of sophistication, and I remember writing a program in BBC Basic to print blank stripboard1 templates to help me layout small electronic circuits.

This is an update of the same idea, but it's written in Perl and generates PostScript. Here's a sample:

Installation instructions

The program is a single file Perl executable, so you just need to download it2 and copy it to a suitable place. For example, to download it and put it in /usr/local/bin, you could do this:

% wget http://www.mjoldfield.com/atelier/2009/02/ds/draw-sboard.pl
% sudo mv draw-sboard.pl /usr/local/bin
% sudo chmod a+rx        /usr/local/bin/draw-sboard.pl

Execution instructions

If you want to print a template for a piece of board with 10 strips of 20 holes each, then you should do something like this:

% draw-sboard 10 20
% lpr 10x20@100.ps

If you want to get more information, do this:

% draw-sboard --help

Sample output

Of course, you could just download some I prepared earlier:

StripsHolesMagnificationFiles
9252xPostScript3 PDF4
24371xPostScript5 PDF6
36501xPostScript7 PDF8
361700.5xPostScript9 PDF10