Inspired by the Shop Tips series by jw0752 , I thought it was worthwhile to show some home-made circuit board holders I have recently been using. The aim was to support the circuit boards in an angled position, to make it easier to work them.
The solutions described here were found to be useful during development, test and other prototyping activities such as connecting up scope probes to boards for measurement purposes.
The holders could also be used at exhibitions as display stands.
As an initial step I started off with some wooden stands:
The wooden stands are just a piece of any favorite wood with an angled slot cut out (easy to do with a circular saw, or possibly with some dremel and attachment to simulate a mini router. I used beeswax on them for a retro finish. The slot is about 1.6mm wide to allow the usual thickness circuit boards/stripboards/perfboards to be fitted. Only 1mm of board needs to be pushed into the slot for this type of stand to work.
There are actually two slots in the wood blocks. The second slot is not at an angle and is cut normally - that is so that the blocks can be used in pairs like this too:
Or like this, performing measurements with an oscilloscope probe attached (the D sized battery is just to show that a lot of weight can be supported without the stands collapsing):
They are great for supporting boards while running tests or doing soldering.
Here are more examples showing the flexibility of these wood blocks:
Angled support:
Another circuit board holder is based around an adjustable angled clamp type of design. It is very easy to do – take a piece of plastic (or wood) and drill two 2.5mm holes about 20mm deep. Then enlarge the hole to 3mm but just partially, to a depth of around 10mm.
Next, cut the plastic at any desired angle. Here are the two finished pieces of plastic:
The smaller piece now has 3mm diameter holes, and the large piece has 2.5mm diameter holes.
A thread was cut into the 2.5mm diameter holes by turning M3 screws into them (a tapping tool could be used but is unnecessary).
Here is the assembled clamp (thumbscrews would be a good idea, I did not have any):
The clamp in use:
Any board can be clamped in place, but a better approach is to use a Problemchild -engineered clear base plate as shown here:
The clear plate is designed to accommodate most of the popular development boards; Arduino, BeagleBone Black, FRDM boards, Raspberry Pi and so on. There are enough holes that there is a good chance that any typical dev-board sized PCB will probably fit.
There are U-shaped notches (you can see it in the photo above) on the edge of the clear plate, and it will slot into the clamp around the screws.
With multiple clear plates, they could be slotted in and out of the clamp with ease, depending on the project that is being worked on at any point in time. The clear plate is great for customisation too – just drill holes to suit whatever board or component needs fitting.
To summarize, I have found a lot of uses for these stands/clamps/plates. They are very easy to use and extremely low cost. They also look (I think) clean and simple which is ideal for events/exhibitions where you may want to focus on the board or project, not on the support mounts.
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