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:
Strips | Holes | Magnification | Files |
---|---|---|---|
9 | 25 | 2x | PostScript3 PDF4 |
24 | 37 | 1x | PostScript5 PDF6 |
36 | 50 | 1x | PostScript7 PDF8 |
36 | 170 | 0.5x | PostScript9 PDF10 |
References
- 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stripboard
- 2. /atelier/2009/02/ds/draw-sboard.pl
- 3. /atelier/2009/02/ds/9x25@200.ps
- 4. /atelier/2009/02/ds/9x25@200.pdf
- 5. /atelier/2009/02/ds/24x37@100.ps
- 6. /atelier/2009/02/ds/24x37@100.pdf
- 7. /atelier/2009/02/ds/36x50@100.ps
- 8. /atelier/2009/02/ds/36x50@100.pdf
- 9. /atelier/2009/02/ds/36x170@50.ps
- 10. /atelier/2009/02/ds/36x170@50.pdf