Flower Review From Wilbert van Wees

Since we released Flower ProtoBoard and accepted sample request, we have begun to receive some feedback. There are more detailed testing and suggestion for Flower ProtoBoard. First of all thanks them for the positive feedback, and we will select some of review sharing with you. I believe you will learn more about Flower ProtoBoard. We received first feedback of review is from Wilbert van Wees His review as below:

" On the blog from Elecfreaks I read about their new Flower 2.2 protoboard for the Arduino mega. The protoboard had a new style of solder pads which could be used for troughole and SMT components. The connecting multiple pads should also be easier and should take less solder. If you were willing to write a review you could get a free board. As I liked the innovative design I quickly requested a sample board. A couple of weeks later I got a message from the mail man that I could collect a package from the post office.

The package containt the latest version of their Flower board as well as an earlier version and a business card. All was well packaged in some bubble wrap plastic. The board comes with two single row header strips and one double row header strips.

The close up shows why they called it "flower", the pads are double sided plated through hole.

For comparison some standard prototoboard:

Some stripboard (my favourite protoboard)

And some tripad stripboard (also really useful)

Now back to the flower board. To test it I soldered a 0805 resistor and led on to the board and a SOT 23 transistor for testing the SMT capabilities. For testing the troughole a button and a DIP 8 socket was soldered to the board. The last thing to test was to solder some pads together for point to point wiring. The result is shown below:

A close up from all the soldered parts:

The point to point needs some practice, basically you need to do it right the first time, otherwise the flux and heat will cause two separate solder blobs and no connection between the pads. As I normally use wire to connect I cannot compare this to normal protoboard.

Through hole works as good as any protoboard with the added bonus of double sided pads, which can be very handy some times:

Soldering the 0805 smt parts works well and because the pads are quite large it's easy to connect it to the next pad and thus creating a circuit. The SOT 23 transistor needs to be mounted on angle to connect to three different pads. Acording to Elecfreaks the board can also be used 0402, 0603 and SOT 223 components, but I don't have these available.

Verdict: The Flower protoboard is a clever new design which makes it easy so combine SMT with throughole to save some board space on an Arduino proto shield. I missed the silk screen idicating the name / function of the pin. The price of the shield is on par with other protoshields on sale elsewhere. I hope elecfreaks will also make some single and double sided protoboard for none Arduino usage using the "flower" pads. The good: