[robocup-small] Making circuit boards for the robots: PCB vs throughhole/wirewrap techniques: advice

[Zachary Noyes]

Hi RoboCup community:

Our team is getting close to ordering parts and I am wondering what would be
an optimal method of hooking electronic parts together.

The most common technique is PCB board layout. I predict several issues with
this:

1) The boards themselves are not modifiable once they come in the mail, so
any mistakes that are made in wiring design are hard to reverse.
2) The rules of robocup change often, and from what I have seen in other's
documentation, so do the robots. I know that you can get adaptors for parts
on PCB board and swap out parts from the same family. However, if a larger
modification is needed (added sensor, etc), you might have to get a new
board.

However this has the advantages of:
1) compact board layout, easy to view
2) No hanging wires
3) A direct translation between a digital and physical design (if using
something like PCB express)


There is another technique that involves through hole/dip packages called
"wire wrapping", where you wrap wires around the pins of the chip (or
extension pins, I can't tell from the wikipedia article). There are boards
that have pins on one side and the components on the other side for the
wires to wrap around. There are advantages and disadvantages to this as
well:

Advantages:
1) No solder required/ things can be undone and parts removed easily
2) If a major design change is needed (lets say the rules change, etc),
parts can be switched out.
3) I have read that the boards are robust/resistant to physical
damage/strain

Disadvantages:
1) you have a mess of wires on one side of the board (not to bad for us
because we aren't using *that *many chips)
2) you are more likely to make an error in board construction and have to
double check your work


The problem with this analysis is that it is only based off of what I've
read on the internet: I don't have any experience soldering or wire
wrapping. Can someone that does have such experience weigh in? Thanks.

--Zach
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