Stripboard/ Veroboard and layout software

Veroboard was invented in Britain by post-war aircraft industry engineers working for Vero Precision Engineering Limited and a patent was filed in 1959 - over sixty years ago! They worked for Geoffrey Verdon-Roe (1918-1997) who was the son of its Chairman, Alliot Verdon-Roe of AVRO aircraft fame (Lancaster bomber, Shackleton, Avro Vulcan etc).

Alliot Verdon-Roe was also connected with contractors working in the UK space programme. It's my belief that the product was created (a) to give Vero engineers something to do, and (b) to develop a way of protoyping circuits fit for the space race, in the new transistor age.

The UK Intellectual Property Office kindly helped me to locate those long-lost patent documents from the 1950s: the original GB Veroboard Patent is downloadable from my site here. The French patent is here.

It is a copper-clad insulated board (SRBP) that is milled to create strips of copper that are then punched with a regular matrix, usually 0.1" between centres. Strips can be broken using a spot face cutter or twist drill, or parallel strips can be linked with jumper wires.

The original patent drawing for Vero's 'improved wiring board'

Historically, bulky circuits were prototyped and wired up on wooden panels like breadboards, and the name 'breadboarding' has stuck ever since.

Veroboard manufacture in 1966 [click to see]Veroboard has been a masterpiece of design that brought the world the ability to build and experiment with electronic circuits. As an electronics prototyping medium it's never been bettered. The biggest piece of Veroboard I ever bought as a hobbyist must have been about 18" long, and needless to say it arrived in the post smashed up!

• I described the full story of Veroboard in the January 2025 issue of Practical Electronics magazine.
• You can download all my constructional projects from the 1970's onwards here. Many of them were built on Veroboard originally.

Ambyr Stripboard Magic

A popular (in its time) stripboard/ Veroboard layout program for Windows, 1990's era Stripboard Magic was developed in Britain by Ambyr Ltd. but disappeared without trace after a brief spell of success, selling as boxed software in Maplin stores too. Although it has been abandoned, copies of it spring up all over the web.

It ran in Windows XP but proved problematic in Windows 7+, the commonest problem being an error on installation Setup is unable to find installation languages in setup.lid file. Error105.

Stripboard Magic in Windows 7 Pro/ 64 bit [click to see]You can search and download Stripboard Magic 1.0 from various places around the web (not here!).  After unzipping the program into a folder, instead of using the program's front-end installer, a solution is to open the DATA1.CAB file with a software tool like Jared Breland's Universal Extractor which will extract the cabinet file, so try extracting that to a sub-folder. In there you will find the executable for Stripboard Magic. Double-click the .exe and it should run, and see how far you get. I took a screenshot (left) to prove it installed OK.

Also try LochMaster (literally, Hole Master) from Germany's Abacom. As always, all such material is downloaded and used entirely at your risk, not mine.