How to plan a perfboard layout

On perfboard every pad is on its own. Every connection is a wire or a bent lead you add on the back, so a layout is worth ten minutes on paper or in an editor before the first joint.

Place

1. Edges first. Connectors, screw terminals, an IR receiver, an LED that must be seen: on the edge they face, facing out.
2. The biggest part next. A module or a DIP socket decides where everything else fits. A WiFi module's antenna end wants to hang over air, not over wires.
3. Near what it serves. A decoupling capacitor within three holes of the chip's supply pin. Hot parts three holes from electrolytics. Mains three holes from everything else. An IR receiver five holes from the LEDs it would hear.
4. One clear hole between parts. That hole is where the iron goes.

Wire

• Think mirrored. The back is the front flipped left to right. Plan it from the mirrored view, or you will wire the mirror image.
• Short, nearest to nearest, few crossings. Turn a corner by soldering into a bare hole, not by bending a wire in the air.
• Three wires on a pad, at most. The fourth lifts the first on rework.

Check, then solder

Before cutting anything: no two parts in one hole, no lead off the board, every connector at an edge, every chip's power pins on a net, no pad with four wires, no net of one pin. Then solder lowest parts first, wires last, shortest first, and tick each off. Adafruit's soldering guide and SparkFun's through-hole tutorial cover the iron itself.

Tools

• Perfboarder does the list above in the browser: real parts with pin names, both faces with the back mirrored, the checks reported before you solder, and a build mode that ticks off parts and wires. Free, no account.
• DIY Layout Creator is the desktop tool for perfboard and stripboard; Fritzing offers both as boards in its breadboard view.
• Stripboard is the other common prototyping board; its copper strips change the rules above.
• Questions and finished boards: r/perfboarder.