As I understand it, breadboards basically serve as a means of
prototyping custom printed circuit boards, providing a standardized
grid of connection points to which individual components can be
attached in a way that is robust enough to be long lasting, but
impermanent enough to allow experimentation with circuit designs.
They are useful for a number of hardware-intensive DIY projects where
you need to connect many components but overall compactness of design
is not a first priority.
I've never used a breadboard because I've never done anything that
involved connecting individual components, and my education as a
computer scientist focused almost entirely on the coding side of
things. My use of the Raspberry Pi has so far focused on its use as a
miniPC and any extension to what can be done with its built-in
hardware has relied on peripherals connected via USB.
If you want to use the Pi to learn circuit design, I suspect you'll be
quite limited without breadboarding, but there's plenty of stuff that
can be done with just the Pi, standard peripherals, and some knowledge
of the Linux command line and/or programming. Performance aside and
ignoring the difference between terminal screenreaders, about the only
thing I can do on my Desktop that I can't do on the Pi is run Firefox
with Orca(and its pretty well-documented that the Pi just doesn't have
the raw power to handle both a heavy accessibility stack and a
graphical environment simultaneously, and to my knowledge, experiments
with lighter weight window managers are barely beginning and there's
yet to be much success running Orca without the benefit of a USB sound
card.
--
Sincerely,
Jeffery Wright
Bachelor of Computer Science
President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa.
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