I was an Electronics technician back in the 70's and spent many hours wire wrapping, I think I still have a battery operated wire wrapping tool. Keep up the great videos!
Yep - had a battery wire wrapping tool myself. Did lots of wire wrapping in telecom closets and data centers. My boss used to give me grief about using the batt operated tool, it wasn't for real tech's....
I used to have a very cheap wire wrapping tool run on batteries. I loved it. It did a much better job of wire wrapping than the hand tool and was way quicker. I wish I still had it.
Like they say -- "if I had a penny for every ...". I can't begin to count the number of wire-wraps I did in my 15 years with IBM. The weekends were for engineering changes and we would rip-and-tear to get everything working by Monday. Thanks for the memories!
Don’t forget the modified wrap tools. They would wrap 1-2 turns of insulated wire around the pin before wrapping the conductor. This provided a much sturdier connection as it better supported the connecting wire. Very important if there were physical shocks or vibration.
Multiple thumbs up, for finding the arpanet map of 1977 (very cool) and mentioning my hero Bil Herd. Been using wire wrap since mid 1980s. I have the same wrap tool but mine is gold color.
@@AndreasSpiess Mine's gold too - I was actually jealous of your blue one. When I got mine, they were all gold... FWIW, the stripper in mine nicked wire pretty often. That's why I went with a box of various lengths and colors of pre stripped stuff. Quality wire strippers that went to 30 awg weren't on every street corner in the '70s, not hardly. There were some adjustable ones that would go that low, kind of but they tended to eat wire - just not repeatably precise enough.
Wow - I was a DEC field service guy (that's #48818 to you) and maintained some of that node at ARPA - I can vouch for the compliment of machines there, the modem (PDP-11/40 + a rack of BB&N modem stuff) and the main work machine - the PDP-15, were "mine". Back in the day I bought a ton of pre-cut and stripped WW wire, tried out all the tools, wound up mostly using a hand tool (like pictured here), as the manual and C battery guns had "issues. Still have that stuff - I didn't wind up building as many Kaypro/Xerox-820 clones as I'd planned. I'd point out a couple of things - one is that you can hold your long-pinned breakout board into the perfboard with a WW connection, so you don't need solder to hold it on (at least loosely). Second, it pays to put the wires you're most sure of on first, as multilayer wire wraps can get into some real interesting comedy of unwrapping to change one that's under two others...which are under ... and so on. You really do not want to try and reuse a wire-end as said here - the nicks you put in it using it the first time will give trouble later. It maybe should have been mentioned that there needs to be a little insulation involved, so at least part of the first turn (the rules used to say at least one whole turn) is insulated wire. That way a little spring-back won't make for shorts later on.
@@boblewis5558 That was a great job, if I'd had any idea I might have postponed my career moves for a few more years. I wound up mid-atlantic support in record time. Met Ken O by accident up in Maynard...super good guy. Upvote for DEC guy - we had the world in our hands for awhile.
FYI, wire wrapping goes back to at least the early 50's if not even farther back. Wire wrapping as a technique has been used since the late 1800's, although the first device specifically built to the standards we now think of as "wire wrapping" was not introduced until 1953. I VERY much applaud you making this video, as virtually all young engineers I know are totally unaware of the technology and are generally blown away to find out how it can "outperform" solder in specific applications (thus the use in Apollo et al). You just made the world a slightly better place. :)
I love this video! I discovered wire wrapping a few years ago when I started working on vintage 1970's stereo amplifiers. I even bought a wire wrapping tool. Recently I started building a project with a microcontroller and several boards and it occurred to me why not use wire wrapping instead of Dupont connectors or soldering wires directly to the boards, or spending money on fancy connectors. Apparently it wasn't a crazy idea!
In 1963, I was a 'Youth in Training' GPO telephone engineer and was sent to West Byfleet Telephone Exchange in Surrey, UK, to do some wire-wrapping at their new exchange. I think I used an electrically driven gun. I later moved on to be a computer mainframe engineer and worked on the CDC 6600 at London University, which appears on the bottom right of the Arpanet Logical map, March 1977, shown at 1:41 in your video. Thanks for sharing that and bringing back so many memories. I must get a wire-wrapping tool and give it a go again.
Glad to see that I’m not the only one still using wire wrap for projects. Just bought a new ok tool - lost the old one I built my altair clone with. I like the built in stripper also, you should wrap clockwise 6-8 turns. The dupont connectors are great for breadboarding and I use them a lot. However, if you want a reliable prototype or 1 off part, wirewrap is much better.
You are right. But I am lefthanded. So my wraps are the other way round. So far I had no complaints from the electrons ;-) I tried to remove one of the relatively short wraps and only tore the wire apart. I made them shorter because often we only have short pins, not as in the past. But like that, you still get 2 or even 3 connections on one pin.
Well this takes me back! I thought I was the only one here to still have WW equipment. I always use the stripper in the middle of the tool and if you're planning on buying a hand WW tool make sure it does the "modified wrap". This puts a turn of insulated wire around the post first and prevents wire breaking at this critical point. For components such as resistors and capacitors I use single sided WW pins which have a notch on the upper side to solder the component wire to. I have built Z80, 6809 and 68HC11 boards in the dim distant past using this technique. I remember being at Plessey in the early 1980's when computerised WW was introduced for wiring backplanes; it reduced the time per board from almost a full day to just 20 minutes each! Bob
Thanks for bringing this forgotten technique for wiring circuits together without the need of soldering!!!!! I’m impressed with how well it works with detaching wires almost as much as I was immediately blown away by just how effective it was at connecting them in the first place!!!!
I've never done wire wrapping myself, but i've understood being told that it only works (reliably) on square pins, since you get that gas-tight connections when the corners cut into the wire, whereas you don't get this on round pins/legs.
Having done tens of thousands of telecom connections in the 80's and even 90's I can tell you that square or round work just fine. The higher end equipment had round pins.
The correct pin to use is a square one. The reason is that the connection when done properly, actually cold-welds the wire to the pin. Round pins can work, but I would dispute their superiority. Neither DEC (Where I worked, as did Andreas), IBM nor HP AFAIK ever used round pins and they made about as high end stuff as you could find anywhere. If you unwrap a pin that's been wire-wrapped a long time, the weld points on the pin can usually be seen quite easily. About the only unreliable thing about backplanes made like this (very common) was if the auto wire-wrapped machine broke a wire, it would redo the link, but very occasionally the broken piece of bare wire would end up causing a short between backplane pins. I had a very intermittent fault on a DEC DX11 IBM peripheral interface once, that I spent a whole weekend troubleshooting with a support engineer. We could consistently cause a diagnostic loop failure by rattling the backplane pins but we never found the piece of wire! It required a complete new backplane ordering and fitting to fix the problem. It was real fun and games unplugging and refitting all the modules (around 90 of them) back into the backplane. 😱😁
@@alaskawoodman , I wonder if there's any belcor specs floating around on the interwebs on round pins? Mil stuff was all 025 square posts that I've seen. You could feel the tink tink tink from the cold welds when unwrapping them.
IIRC, there was a type of wire that could be wrapped without stripping, this could only be used with square pins, as the corners could pierce the (very thin) insulation. If you stripped the wire, then round pins were fine. I think the square pins would make the most reliable connection, though, as the wrapping wire is tensioned at the corners and makes the best contact there, with the least oxidation.
Brings back memories... like others who have commented, I too still have my wire wrap tools (battery operated and manual) bought from RS back in the early 90s. One point to note (not sure if this was mentioned by someone else) but you don’t really need a separate stripping tool as that is already built into the handle (see small hole and black metal plate with a slot). I found this perfectly adequate for prototyping but perhaps not so good for large boards with many hundreds of connections, but then you would use the electric tool anyway. I had a preference to use blue wire for data lines, green for address lines, red for Vcc, black for Gnd.
I remember reading about this in Forrest Mims III's Getting Started in Electronics book when I was 12. I'm now 36 and I have just purchased my first spool of wire, a tool, and a bunch of sockets both breakoff and solid 2.54mm arduino types. I am gonna have so much rapid-prototyping fun with this stuff. :)
I use these 30AWG wires for several things in my lab. Particularly to correct errors on my PCBs. They are very thin and easy to solder also to small pins.
@@AndreasSpiess Appreciate the response! I'll be using them to repair PCB traces indeed. Amused by the history behind it, also watched the Wire Wrap video you recommended by Bil Herd. Thank you!
Wow, this is really cool! Yesterday I was completing my project, although I love programming and electronics, I found out that my shaky hands are not compatible with soldering. This is really cool way to connect stuff. Thanks for this video!
This remembers my olden days during the '90s where I was involved in the wrapping for the Thompson telephone exchange back panel with mains operated wrapping gun. - Thanks, Andreas Spiess.
Hammer! Wieso sehe ich das erst jetzt? Habe gerade letzte Woche erst dutzende kleine Kabel verlötet... Das hätte mir einen Haufen Arbeit gespart... Wie auch immer, habe soeben bestellt - vielen Dank für den genialen Tip!!
I realize this is an older video, but this just now popped up in my suggestions list. Funny, I made literally tens of thousands of wire wrap connections in my days. And yes, I did have a manual wire wrap tool. But we mostly used hand held power wire wrap guns. Amazing how fast you can wire up even a difficult circuit. But than I also used through hole and even surface mount PC boards as well. Thumbs Up!
Huh! interesting old tech! while depopulating older electronics, i was always impressed about the manufacture abilities, to wrap tiny wires around a pin so well! now i know how it was done! Thank you for showing us.
I bought a wire wrapping tool back in the 70's when I first wanted to get started in electronics. However, I never knew what in the world I was supposed to do with it. I also bought some 555 timer chips and had no idea what to do with those either. Sadly I lost interest before I ever figured out what to do with either of them. Well I have finally come back to electronics again. I have lost to many brain cells to ever be any good at it, but at least (thanks to you) I now know what that crazy looking tool is/was supposed to do. Thanks!
I Andreas! Love your channel and watch it all the time! I used to use wrapping for all my projects back in the 80's. My largest project had over 6000 wire wrap connections for a stage lighting controller. It still works today.
In my high school, the teachers (and students) use wirewrapping for connecting components in the projects that seniors do. Has been this way for a very long time :)
I've decided to start wire wrapping for quick painless prototyping. They make long headers so why not. Thanks Andreas, yours was first video in my search
I had no idea that's what 'wire wrapping wire' ment on AliExpress. I assumed it was for making transformers or motor coils. Getting some to try it out. Thank you!
I wire wraped a PDP-8 to change current circuit communication to voltage level RS 232. PDP-8 was really a simple architecture, without even a stack and CALL- and RET-instructions. Ah, the memories of wrapping together a small computers with a 6809, 8085 or 8031 and some ram, rom and IO devices.
The joys of the "Omnibus"! Unibus on PDP11s frequently needed the bus grant jumper adding or removing for config changes from different boards. SO easy to get wrong though!
@@AndreasSpiess PDP 8 is older then both TRS-80, the z80 CPU and then 8080. Yes, some of the earlier 8080-8085 (and later Z80) based computers was also wire wrapped. Later was based on PCB:s, as it isn't as expensive to mass produce. In the University back in 1982, when I first studied Computer, we used wire wrapping a lot. Great for prototyping. The PDP 8 was the first mini computer in the world, which means that it was much smaller then previous computers.It could be bought by a research group in a University, in the offices. Not like the previous computer. Yes, a mini computer back then weight about 200-300 kg, might have a HD and probably tapes as storage. And several terminals to work from. The PDP-8 was built by wire wrapping flip chips together. Those was basically the same functions in later TTL chip, but by discrete components on a PCB. PDP-11 was also a mini computer, but PDP-8 was a 12 bit computer, and the PDP-11 was a 16 bit computer, and it was inspiration for the 68000 CPU:s.
The old is new again! I did wire wrapping for many projects in the 70s. Very easy and reliable. I still use my gold tool today. Great to see you introducing the technology to new users. Great video as usual.
Thanks for keeping these old-school techniques alive, it never hurts to have numerous options. And there's a kind of spooky artistic-ness to it, it just looks cool on the bigger boards with more wiring. Great vid as usual!
With the re-growing community of electronic hobby-enthusiasts, this wire wrapping technology along with the "Fädeltechnik" using wiring pencils, these almost forgotten techs do experience a sort of a revival. WhenI was 14 (long time ago) I had built a wiring pencil from a full metal emptied ballpen core/refill (remove color and ball, clean it). The sharp ring at the tip is great for cutting the wire after soldering, by just pressing it to the lead. I still use it and can prototype quite fast with it. You can go from pin to pin with it. Turn at least one wrap around, then go to the next... Signal per Signal can be completed by this in a fast manner. A tiny holding contraption to fixate the wire while wrapping around a pin was quickly set up, also the holder for the tiny wire coil at the end of the pen.
Riesigen Dank, dass Du mich über das Video auf diese Technik gebracht hast. Ich bin Hobbyist und habe oft bei Prototypen irgendwelche Fehler drin gehabt, die sich bereits gelötet schlecht reparieren ließen. Beim Wire Wrapping kann man wunderbar nachbessern.
My wire wrapping tool arrived today and I have to say, beats duponts anyday. I love this technic and you can really makes things look organised. Well worth the time to invest in
I worked for the the Italian division of the German Industrial automation company Hartman& Braun for 13 years, for several years from 1987 I worked on the Contronic 3 automation system for power stations, a project could be formed by about 50 two meter tall cabinets filled with eurocard size electronic cards all wire wrapped on the back plane, I was in the testing department, and had quite a job correcting wiring and simulating operations. Luckily we got two computer controlled machines that were capable together with an operator to reduce a two week cabling job on a cabinet to two days, with near zero mistakes reducing drastically my time for checking. Today we use DCS and 99% of the wireing has been substituted with SW.
@@AndreasSpiess I'm not using wire wrap for my prototypes, for quick prototypes I prefer using copper strip pre drilled breadboards, I use a 3mm drill bit to interrupt the copper strips where needed and use wire wrap wire cut to size for jumps. I'm also use the UV Positive Photoresist and etching method, and the CNC milling and drilling method.
That small black piece of steel in the middle of the handle is a wire stripper. Push the wire through, slide it into the slot and pull the insulation off. You MUST insert the wire so that when you pull, the cutting blade presses onto the body of the tool. Get it the wrong way round and you will bend the blade. You can get wrapping wire that doesn't need stripping, but you need special pins with square edges that bite into the insulation. In the 1970s I worked for Burroughs Machines who had terminals in every branch of NatWest, Barclays, Midland and Yorkshire banks, and it was a regular task to do modifications to the wire-wrapped backplane.
You are right about the stripper. However, I never liked it :-( I am not sure if you still get this "special" wire. But it was very handy. And indeed, even some "programming" was done back then on the backplane by changing wires. I just watched a video about the restauration of a PDP11 with lots of wire wraps...
@@AndreasSpiess I haven't done any wire wrapping since the 1980s, I gave all my wrapping stuff away, something I now regret as I'm thinking about using it for prototyping. I'm not too keen on breadboards. Did you ever use the the method wrapping where you didn't need to strip the insulation? The pins were square in section with sharp corners which pierced the insulation as you performed the wrap. IIRC the wire was a special type too.
The tool you buy on Aliexpress has a wire stripper integrated in the handle. You can DIY a toold by drilling a small hole on the side near the end if a small tube, such as the plastic tube from a q-tip, or a in pen lead. Feed the wire from the end through the inside of the tube and the hole you drilled.
Very reliable. I used it around 1980 to build a 8 kByte memory expansion board for my Commodore PET 2001. I designed it myself and it still worked when I last tried it 3 years ago. The base was a Eurocard(?). All IC's went in wirewrapping DIL sockets. The only soldering was for a connector, the IC power pins and the decoupling capacitors for all the ICs.
You brought me back to my internship in the 80's. Thank you. I still have these tools and they're excellent. I also recommend. Reliable computers like PDP I have worked with were wired wrapped. Memories...
Glad to see this video. This is exactly how all our prototype and small quantity boards were made. We also added conformal coat to secure and isolate the pin side of a board. If coated and in need of modification, you have to use a solvent to remove the coat. I'm not a fan of Dupont wires because it is too easy for them to become loose and of course the 1 to 1 issue but everything has its uses.
The main disadvantage is that it builds height and the long pins has a risk of bending, causing short-circuits. I prefer soldering and use a small piece of experimental circuit board for external components. Another method I've used is experimental boards and solder using wire wrapping wire. Since this wire is so thin, it's rather easy to add more connections later since you can easily have 4-5 wires in the same hole. Heat up again with the soldering iron, stick in another wire. Doesn't build height.
I still have a Z80 system I made this way - wire wrap was my go to method for prototyping. But a sea of blue wires could be a problem when debugging so thanks for the tip of using coloured wires. I will now track down my old WW tool...
Back in the early 80s I made quite complex Z80 and 6502 systems using wire-wrap IC sockets and thousands of wires. Very tedious but eventually satisfying when it worked. I still use the same wire for jumpers as it's coated in high-temperature plastic and very easy to solder. Just yesterday I was wire wrapping a couple of small DC-DC converter modules onto a board.
I think the wire we originally used was 30 AWG, the conductor was silver coated with teflon insulation. No internet and very little mail-order back then so we had to go through manufacturers agents, wait long delivery times and pay high prices. We used hand tools for wire wrap IC sockets and connectors on boards but had electric tools for the larger size wiring between panels. Another technique we used was to plan out CPU-RAM-EPROM-IO wiring between sockets then cut-twist-solder wire-wrap wire using standard IC sockets. A lot of it was data and address bus runs so easily duplicated. This method made a lower profile and more robust board. These boards were only clocked at 2-4MHz so wire layout wasn't too much of an issue for one-off industrial controllers.
I spent many hours wire-wrapping in the 70's - I then rewrapped a VAX 11/780 backplane in 1989 - tens of thousands of wraps over a week because there was no replacement in Europe - got 3 wraps wrong in all of those - I wouldnt ever want to go back to it :)
I can imagine... But back then we did not have multi-layered PCBs and high-density ICs. So it was probably the only way to do so many connections in a small space.
Hi Andreas, glad my tip made into your well organised video overview, congrats! I enjoyed the benefits of wire wrap in many projects and I am happy that it gets a broader attention! Thanks for showing my name in your video detail, as as I said: the technology is old, but fortunately the wires do not know about that....
You are welcome! If you read the comments this technology is very well known. But forgotten somehow... I think we helped many good memories to re-appear.
I still use wire wrapping today for digital logic circuit prototyping! I have an automatic wire wrapping gun and wire strippers specifically for wire wrap wire which cuts and strips the correct length of insulation. Made quite a few one off production units for customers back in the 80's just using EUROCARD size wire wrap boards!
Really? Insulation displacement connections like Krone is super common but haven’t seen wire wrap blocks in telcos for YEARS. As a matter of interest, where have you seen this used recently?
@@tonysouthern3017 The reason is just that ther are old installations out there. I live also in Switzerland like Andreas does and was a former Electrician (they do most of the "wire" part of telecommunication infrastructures), and I worked on modern Terminals like the VS system from Reichle de Massari (R&M) which is really REALLY easy to use and extremely fast. And I had to solder or wirewrap on older Terminals, some are with screw terminals etc... and I worked mostly in one small City with around 25'000 citizens. And if you know that like I do, it's really not surprising why DSL (which uses these connections) has so much trouble with speed and reliability ^^
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Wonderful tool. it save lots of time. Thank you for recording the video.
@@AndreasSpiess well, at Siemens the wrapped boards were put in a machine which tested all connections and output an ist-soll vergleich. Zb connection from AB12 to BC06 shouldn’t be there. Or D12 to BC34 is not present. Then I put high voltage on connections that should not be there to get rid of residue. And I wrapped missing connections. An I ate a lot of zwetchendatchi with the women in Fehlersuche ;-)
Oh man! this reminds me of digital transmissions X-connections of the 90s! One more tip for beginners: the black sharp metal piece placed at the side of the wire wrapping tool is to peel off plastic covers of the wire, no extra tool is required.
In the 80's I worked at Singer - Link Flight Simulation translating schematics to wire wrapping lists for the factory workers to wire wrap backplanes and circuit cards. I still use it for occasional personal projects.
The first electronic telephone switch that I worked on, an ITT-TE-400G, was totally built using wire wrap. You even "programmed" hunt groups by wire wrapping various pins together. I have also built dozens of IC based projects using wire wrap. I think I wore out at least two of the hobby type battery powered tools. I still have the manual tools and occasionally use them on Arduino projects similar to what he shows in the video.
Ah happy days with my automatic wire wrap gun. It cut, stripped and wrapped all in a single, rapid move. As you say the joints were as good as solder as they were 'gas tight' around the corners of the pins.
Was in telecoms in the 70s most connections were wire wrapped. The electric wire wrappers also stripped the wires. The actual wire when wrapped well form as a cold weld to the corners of the pins and if you find an old wrapped board and unwind the wire when it gets to a corner you can sometimes here a faint ping and feel more resistance at that point.
Your wire wrapping tool includes a wire stripper in the center. Just thread it through the wide side and pull it down. Also I use another bigger size tool to wrap breadboard size wires. Much easier than soldering. Surprisingly reliable as well.
There was a system that use self-fluxing enamelled copper wire. You had a small spool of the stuff on the end of a hollow wiring pen, the wire went down the centre of the "pen" and came out at the "nib", you soldered the wire at the starting point and moved from point to point, soldering as you went along.
@@AndreasSpiess Yea, I didn't really get on with it, I still have a virtually full reel of wire which is about 40 years old. You had to use more heat than with tinned copper wire and the residue was dirty.
Great video. I've been wire wrapping my prototypes since the seventies. It is much more convenient than etching pubs and the project is testable quickly.
Nice video. I still have my wire wrapping tool I bought from Radio Shack when I was a teenager about 30 years ago. It still gets used today. Also do not restrict yourself to just 30 gauge wire. If the wire fits it in the tool you can wrap it. I use it quite often to make small wire harnesses. For a more permanent connection I will solder the wire and add a bit of hot melt glue for strain relief.
The biggest factor in tool size is if it will fit between the pins of the connector. I have a 22 gauge that absolutely won't - you have to bend the pins to get it to fit. I bought 24 gauge solid wire for a few projects so i could solder directly to a D1 mini. 24 gauge wire wrap tool would probably be too big too. 30 or 28 maybe
I used this wiring method during a project at my university and I must say that it is a reliable way to connect components but we had a wiring gun to rolling wires and used the other tool to remove the wires.
Wonderful video reminding me of good times doing EE lab projects at university. We were even given electric wire wrapping machine. And hours spend troubleshooting mistakes in sticking to the wiring lists...
Just another gent who did a lot of wire rapping in the '70s. Much easier with a mains powered tool and a good wire stripper with a length guide. If I recall correctly there was even some instances of larger pins and wires for higher currents. Using round pins is not ideal, it's the sharp edges of the square pin biting into the solid copper wire that makes the joint so reliable.
3:12 Whoa. Didn't expect the very cheapest listing of that little tool to be the cost of 4 units of esp32. Decisions, decisions for a student to make 😅
I had ARPANET IMP #17 at our site at the U of MD back in the day in one of my computer rooms, and I operated the first ARPANET/NSFNET interconnects with it. (On a MicroVAX-II, sorry no wire-wrap in that beast.) Though I think I recall doing some wire-wraps on a UNIBUS backplane when we didn't have any bus-grant cards available.. And on a bunch of boards, you selected options/addresses/etc using wire-wrap jumpers between pins rather than those expensive DIP switches that took up a lot more room, too.
I use wire wrap at my day job to build automated test equipment for pcb and electronics testing. It's perfect for all one off jobs and for what i do way better than soldering. Learned it fom my old college (and mentor). Thumb up for the technique and this great video ;)
1:32 if you order vintage aviation parts that are decommissioned, you’ll see atleast some of these components use this method. I’m holding a piece of a retired control panel now that’s got 30 analog inputs using wire wrap
Thanks for the memories. My first micro was a wire wrapped 6502... which was a bit of a pain, as the 6502 was just the processor, no memory or peripherals or even clock like the modern microcontrollers. But (eventually) it worked!
Thanks for this, I did not know it was still possible to buy the tool and wire to do this. I just purchased what you demonstrated, it arrived today, and works great. Thanks again for all your great videos, with so much useful information.
I made my first z80 based home computer on wire wrap boards. Used a cut-strip-wrap tool I think, or at least I used soft insulation wire, as I didn’t need cutters or strippers.
Wire wrapping is still used in the telecommunications industry for cross-connecting T1 DSX (patch panels). These use 22AWG 5 conductor wire and a similar tool (clearly slightly larger to acommodate the larger wire) Though it is rapidly disappearing as discrete T1 circuits are seldom installed any more.
@@AndreasSpiess Absolutely. Plus these days a T1 (and the to the E1 in your part of the world) is considered a very low speed circuit. And is becoming obsolete as telephone system transmission moves away from TDM to more flexible packet based .
I still have my wire wrap tools, both manual and battery powered and some wire wrap IC sockets. I occasionally use them, though Dupont cables are my "go to" for quick Arduino projects, simply because of the female headers on the boards. If I want a "permanent" prototype and it is digital, I will consider wire wrap. However, analog circuits can develop unexpected issues when wire wrap is used, so I avoid it for analog circuits. Resistors are a pain and decoupling capacitors should be soldered in place, even in wrapped designs.
Can you tell me if the connection gets worse if the contacts (pins) are used multiple times? In my training at the power station, we dismantled a switchgear and it was possible to change the pins there.
If the pins (posts) were designed for wire wrap, they are fairly hard (tougher than conventional pins), with square posts, and may be used/reused multiple times. Of course, eventually they may show some wear. If the "switch gear" is the sort used for old telephone systems, then it is designed for lots of reuse. If it is something else, then "maybe?"
Excellent video. Wirewrapping is a technique that should not be forgotten. You did not mention that the pins can not be round, they need to be square so that the edges cuts into the wire and creates a good airtight connection (4 for each turn actually).
There were some discussions around the pins. square works much better, but for hobby usage, I also du sometimes round ones. And solder them if they are not good ;-)
A really nice addition to that fast wiring method is also those "self-adhesive elastic bandage" or in german "schnellpflaster" (google). They are perfect for wraping around PCB's to secure loose wires and also wraping several PCB's together. They also can be reused and you can use them for allmost everything ( dipping it into 2 component glues and wrap it around something, to wrap around handles etc.) i absolutley love them and it is a great enrichment for a makers lab :-)
excellent. I love that in more and more industries, going back to old technology and even old ways (growing your own e coli free lettuce, preserving food, wire wrapping etc.) are in many cases low tech but superior.
Wow, it’s so cool that the OK Industries Wire-Wrap tool (that you linked) appears to be unchanged from the one I bought in the 70’s. :) I built several of my first 6800 & 6809 based micro systems completely wire-wrapped with an OK JW-1 "Just Wrap” tool (which I still have). The JW-1 tool was really fast, as no wire stripping required. The post corners cut through the kynar insulation while wrapping, for reliable connection. It was awesome making really dense DIP based designs on Eurocard square pad boards, with DIN 41612 connectors to a rack mounted Vero backplane.
You are welcome! My videos also cost me money ;-) But I rather spend it on these little gadgets than for things like cigarettes or extensive alcohol...
I also like using the wire wrapping technique for my projects and I am using the same tool made by OK. However, the tool has a step right behind the insertion channel which tends to kink the wire when it is inserted. I filed that step down and polished it with rouge to form a smooth ramp. With that modification, the tool works perfectly for me. One hint: use the square pin headers for ww, the round ones don’t work reliably. But you can add some solder if you have to.
Shockingly I was only born in the early 70s so wire wrapping wasn't something I did while it was in heavy use, though when I started prototyping using PIC microcontrollers in the early 90s I built some boards that still work today. If I liked the design, I used to go round and solder it as I always felt it was more secure, though the couple of boards I didn't solder still worked for years. Thanks for this reminder, I ought to dig out my old tool, I know I have a couple of spools of the wire somewhere too. :-) I think this technique is just as relevant today as it ever was and given the difficulty in buying really good quality breadboards (like those RS used to sell) I am often frustrated trying to use them in breadboards, so often end up skipping to Veroboard or 'dead bug' instead.
I think we had a"rush to the bottom" in Breadboards. Because it is hard to show quality differences in a picture most people just bought the cheapest and the quality manufacturers were not able to survive...
Personally, I find the Verowire system to be superior to the wire-wrap system. It doesn't need long wire-wrap pins for every component, so the resulting board can be much thinner, and neater, and the electrical connections are soldered rather than friction-based. The fine enamelled wires between components are bundled together and routed as busses using plastic verowire "combs" that push into the 0.1" pitch holes on square-pad veroboard. I use a thicker gauge of enamelled wire for the power rails, and then the vero-pen spools of fine wire for the signal connections, Pro-tip: After pushing the comb's plastic mounting pins through the board from below, you use a soldering iron to melt the top of the plastic mounting pins, which rivets the comb to the board and stops them moving or coming lose.
You are right. Every system has its advantages and disadvantages. I also used these enameled wires and did not like them too much. Especially if I needed more than one wire to a pin.
I was an Electronics technician back in the 70's and spent many hours wire wrapping, I think I still have a battery operated wire wrapping tool. Keep up the great videos!
A wire-wrapping tool/'bit' would be a great addition to my ES-121 screwdriver :)
Yep - had a battery wire wrapping tool myself. Did lots of wire wrapping in telecom closets and data centers. My boss used to give me grief about using the batt operated tool, it wasn't for real tech's....
I used to have a very cheap wire wrapping tool run on batteries. I loved it. It did a much better job of wire wrapping than the hand tool and was way quicker. I wish I still had it.
@@paulrautenbach You are not kidding - price one....
But are the electronics for the battery powered wrapping tool also wire wrapped?
Like they say -- "if I had a penny for every ...". I can't begin to count the number of wire-wraps I did in my 15 years with IBM. The weekends were for engineering changes and we would rip-and-tear to get everything working by Monday. Thanks for the memories!
I was astonished about the many stories which are told in the comments. It seems everybody has some memories of Wire Wrapping...
Same here with ICL, Burroughs, Perkin Elmer and Mohawk.
I can't believe I didn't know about this, I have wrapping wire and all of a sudden I think I am going to be using it a lot more. Thanks for the hint!
You are welcome!
Wire wrapping was used on the Apollo Mission computers. Highly reliable.
Also welding wires ua-cam.com/video/vfUhF3BJoBc/v-deo.html
Neat. I wouldn't have guessed that at all.
Interesting. I did not know that!
Don’t forget the modified wrap tools. They would wrap 1-2 turns of insulated wire around the pin before wrapping the conductor. This provided a much sturdier connection as it better supported the connecting wire. Very important if there were physical shocks or vibration.
I think You could do it with the tool I have. I just forgot :-(
Multiple thumbs up, for finding the arpanet map of 1977 (very cool) and mentioning my hero Bil Herd. Been using wire wrap since mid 1980s. I have the same wrap tool but mine is gold color.
I think you deserve the Golden tool for such a long usage!
@@AndreasSpiess Mine's gold too - I was actually jealous of your blue one. When I got mine, they were all gold...
FWIW, the stripper in mine nicked wire pretty often. That's why I went with a box of various lengths and colors of pre stripped stuff.
Quality wire strippers that went to 30 awg weren't on every street corner in the '70s, not hardly. There were some adjustable ones that would go that low, kind of but they tended to eat wire - just not repeatably precise enough.
I unearthed three in various toolboxes - all gold. One was a 22awg tool and I can’t even remember what that was for...
@@mahudson3547 DEC backplanes - the yellow wire pictured in the vid, were 22 awg. Only later on did stuff go down to #30.
Wow - I was a DEC field service guy (that's #48818 to you) and maintained some of that node at ARPA - I can vouch for the compliment of machines there, the modem (PDP-11/40 + a rack of BB&N modem stuff) and the main work machine - the PDP-15, were "mine". Back in the day I bought a ton of pre-cut and stripped WW wire, tried out all the tools, wound up mostly using a hand tool (like pictured here), as the manual and C battery guns had "issues. Still have that stuff - I didn't wind up building as many Kaypro/Xerox-820 clones as I'd planned. I'd point out a couple of things - one is that you can hold your long-pinned breakout board into the perfboard with a WW connection, so you don't need solder to hold it on (at least loosely). Second, it pays to put the wires you're most sure of on first, as multilayer wire wraps can get into some real interesting comedy of unwrapping to change one that's under two others...which are under ... and so on. You really do not want to try and reuse a wire-end as said here - the nicks you put in it using it the first time will give trouble later. It maybe should have been mentioned that there needs to be a little insulation involved, so at least part of the first turn (the rules used to say at least one whole turn) is insulated wire. That way a little spring-back won't make for shorts later on.
#180316
#64407 - still have my original badge!
@@boblewis5558 That was a great job, if I'd had any idea I might have postponed my career moves for a few more years. I wound up mid-atlantic support in record time. Met Ken O by accident up in Maynard...super good guy. Upvote for DEC guy - we had the world in our hands for awhile.
#185184 :) in fact years later when HP acquired 3Com I got my old badge number back but with 10 prepended.
Unfortunately, I forgot my number. I was there from 1988 to 1995
FYI, wire wrapping goes back to at least the early 50's if not even farther back. Wire wrapping as a technique has been used since the late 1800's, although the first device specifically built to the standards we now think of as "wire wrapping" was not introduced until 1953. I VERY much applaud you making this video, as virtually all young engineers I know are totally unaware of the technology and are generally blown away to find out how it can "outperform" solder in specific applications (thus the use in Apollo et al). You just made the world a slightly better place. :)
I was overwhelmed by the may reactions. I did not expect such an echo.
I love this video! I discovered wire wrapping a few years ago when I started working on vintage 1970's stereo amplifiers. I even bought a wire wrapping tool. Recently I started building a project with a microcontroller and several boards and it occurred to me why not use wire wrapping instead of Dupont connectors or soldering wires directly to the boards, or spending money on fancy connectors. Apparently it wasn't a crazy idea!
Very cool!
In 1963, I was a 'Youth in Training' GPO telephone engineer and was sent to West Byfleet Telephone Exchange in Surrey, UK, to do some wire-wrapping at their new exchange. I think I used an electrically driven gun. I later moved on to be a computer mainframe engineer and worked on the CDC 6600 at London University, which appears on the bottom right of the Arpanet Logical map, March 1977, shown at 1:41 in your video. Thanks for sharing that and bringing back so many memories. I must get a wire-wrapping tool and give it a go again.
You are not the only. Many viewers described their experience in the 70s or 80s. However, you were pretty early with wire wrapping ;-)
Glad to see that I’m not the only one still using wire wrap for projects. Just bought a new ok tool - lost the old one I built my altair clone with. I like the built in stripper also, you should wrap clockwise 6-8 turns. The dupont connectors are great for breadboarding and I use them a lot. However, if you want a reliable prototype or 1 off part, wirewrap is much better.
You are right. But I am lefthanded. So my wraps are the other way round. So far I had no complaints from the electrons ;-)
I tried to remove one of the relatively short wraps and only tore the wire apart. I made them shorter because often we only have short pins, not as in the past. But like that, you still get 2 or even 3 connections on one pin.
Well this takes me back! I thought I was the only one here to still have WW equipment. I always use the stripper in the middle of the tool and if you're planning on buying a hand WW tool make sure it does the "modified wrap". This puts a turn of insulated wire around the post first and prevents wire breaking at this critical point. For components such as resistors and capacitors I use single sided WW pins which have a notch on the upper side to solder the component wire to. I have built Z80, 6809 and 68HC11 boards in the dim distant past using this technique. I remember being at Plessey in the early 1980's when computerised WW was introduced for wiring backplanes; it reduced the time per board from almost a full day to just 20 minutes each! Bob
I think modern 3D printer technology would help to build such a "computerized wire wrapper" ;-)
Thanks for bringing this forgotten technique for wiring circuits together without the need of soldering!!!!! I’m impressed with how well it works with detaching wires almost as much as I was immediately blown away by just how effective it was at connecting them in the first place!!!!
This is one of the reasons for the video ;-)
I've never done wire wrapping myself, but i've understood being told that it only works (reliably) on square pins, since you get that gas-tight connections when the corners cut into the wire, whereas you don't get this on round pins/legs.
Having done tens of thousands of telecom connections in the 80's and even 90's I can tell you that square or round work just fine. The higher end equipment had round pins.
@@alaskawoodman cool. Good to know :)
The correct pin to use is a square one. The reason is that the connection when done properly, actually cold-welds the wire to the pin. Round pins can work, but I would dispute their superiority. Neither DEC (Where I worked, as did Andreas), IBM nor HP AFAIK ever used round pins and they made about as high end stuff as you could find anywhere.
If you unwrap a pin that's been wire-wrapped a long time, the weld points on the pin can usually be seen quite easily. About the only unreliable thing about backplanes made like this (very common) was if the auto wire-wrapped machine broke a wire, it would redo the link, but very occasionally the broken piece of bare wire would end up causing a short between backplane pins.
I had a very intermittent fault on a DEC DX11 IBM peripheral interface once, that I spent a whole weekend troubleshooting with a support engineer. We could consistently cause a diagnostic loop failure by rattling the backplane pins but we never found the piece of wire!
It required a complete new backplane ordering and fitting to fix the problem. It was real fun and games unplugging and refitting all the modules (around 90 of them) back into the backplane. 😱😁
@@alaskawoodman , I wonder if there's any belcor specs floating around on the interwebs on round pins? Mil stuff was all 025 square posts that I've seen. You could feel the tink tink tink from the cold welds when unwrapping them.
IIRC, there was a type of wire that could be wrapped without stripping, this could only be used with square pins, as the corners could pierce the (very thin) insulation. If you stripped the wire, then round pins were fine. I think the square pins would make the most reliable connection, though, as the wrapping wire is tensioned at the corners and makes the best contact there, with the least oxidation.
Brings back memories... like others who have commented, I too still have my wire wrap tools (battery operated and manual) bought from RS back in the early 90s. One point to note (not sure if this was mentioned by someone else) but you don’t really need a separate stripping tool as that is already built into the handle (see small hole and black metal plate with a slot). I found this perfectly adequate for prototyping but perhaps not so good for large boards with many hundreds of connections, but then you would use the electric tool anyway. I had a preference to use blue wire for data lines, green for address lines, red for Vcc, black for Gnd.
The hole was mentioned a few times. I tried it but was not happy with it. This is why I used my "trusted" tool.
I remember reading about this in Forrest Mims III's Getting Started in Electronics book when I was 12.
I'm now 36 and I have just purchased my first spool of wire, a tool, and a bunch of sockets both breakoff and solid 2.54mm arduino types.
I am gonna have so much rapid-prototyping fun with this stuff. :)
Cool. Indeed, this is an old technique...
Fascinating stuff! Recently bought that same multi-colored wire for a small project and somehow ended up watching this video 😊
I use these 30AWG wires for several things in my lab. Particularly to correct errors on my PCBs. They are very thin and easy to solder also to small pins.
@@AndreasSpiess Appreciate the response! I'll be using them to repair PCB traces indeed. Amused by the history behind it, also watched the Wire Wrap video you recommended by Bil Herd. Thank you!
Excellent idea! The proliferation of row headers means that wire wrapping is again convenient and useful.
Glad you liked it!
Very interesting! I wasn't alive in the 70s (and I was a child in the 80s) so I didn't know about this technique. Thanks for showing it!
You are welcome!
Wow, this is really cool! Yesterday I was completing my project, although I love programming and electronics, I found out that my shaky hands are not compatible with soldering. This is really cool way to connect stuff. Thanks for this video!
Glad to read that it can help to enjoy your hobby even more!
YAS! I just got my tool and wire and it is working great, just as you said it would. Very impressed. Thank you Andreas!
That was fast! Glad it works.
@@AndreasSpiess it even says OK INDUSTRIES
This remembers my olden days during the '90s where I was involved in the wrapping for the Thompson telephone exchange back panel with mains operated wrapping gun. - Thanks, Andreas Spiess.
You are welcome!
Hammer! Wieso sehe ich das erst jetzt? Habe gerade letzte Woche erst dutzende kleine Kabel verlötet... Das hätte mir einen Haufen Arbeit gespart... Wie auch immer, habe soeben bestellt - vielen Dank für den genialen Tip!!
Gern geschehen. Einfach den Kanal abonieren und den "Alarmknopf" drücken ;-)
I realize this is an older video, but this just now popped up in my suggestions list. Funny, I made literally tens of thousands of wire wrap connections in my days. And yes, I did have a manual wire wrap tool. But we mostly used hand held power wire wrap guns. Amazing how fast you can wire up even a difficult circuit. But than I also used through hole and even surface mount PC boards as well. Thumbs Up!
I think it had its high time before the availability of cheap and fast PCBs. But viewers wrote that it still is used in old telephone systems...
The accent made the tutorial 10 time better. Thanks Andreas!
You are welcome!
Huh! interesting old tech! while depopulating older electronics, i was always impressed about the manufacture abilities, to wrap tiny wires around a pin so well! now i know how it was done! Thank you for showing us.
You are welcome!
I bought a wire wrapping tool back in the 70's when I first wanted to get started in electronics. However, I never knew what in the world I was supposed to do with it. I also bought some 555 timer chips and had no idea what to do with those either. Sadly I lost interest before I ever figured out what to do with either of them. Well I have finally come back to electronics again. I have lost to many brain cells to ever be any good at it, but at least (thanks to you) I now know what that crazy looking tool is/was supposed to do. Thanks!
You are welcome! I think you are not the only who did not exactly know how this technique works.
I Andreas! Love your channel and watch it all the time! I used to use wrapping for all my projects back in the 80's. My largest project had over 6000 wire wrap connections for a stage lighting controller. It still works today.
Thank you! This technology was very reliable, but also quite expensive to produce. Today's CAD with cheap 2 or 4 layser PCBs are also quite nice ;-)
In my high school, the teachers (and students) use wirewrapping for connecting components in the projects that seniors do. Has been this way for a very long time :)
Must have been for a very long time. The technology seems to be forgotten somehow.
I've decided to start wire wrapping for quick painless prototyping. They make long headers so why not. Thanks Andreas, yours was first video in my search
Cool!
I had no idea that's what 'wire wrapping wire' ment on AliExpress. I assumed it was for making transformers or motor coils. Getting some to try it out. Thank you!
You are welcome. Sometimes old men are quite useful ;-)
I wire wraped a PDP-8 to change current circuit communication to voltage level RS 232.
PDP-8 was really a simple architecture, without even a stack and CALL- and RET-instructions.
Ah, the memories of wrapping together a small computers with a 6809, 8085 or 8031 and some ram, rom and IO devices.
The joys of the "Omnibus"! Unibus on PDP11s frequently needed the bus grant jumper adding or removing for config changes from different boards. SO easy to get wrong though!
My Z80 (TRS-80 was already on a PCB. No need for wire wrapping there. But at other places.
@@AndreasSpiess PDP 8 is older then both TRS-80, the z80 CPU and then 8080. Yes, some of the earlier 8080-8085 (and later Z80) based computers was also wire wrapped.
Later was based on PCB:s, as it isn't as expensive to mass produce. In the University back in 1982, when I first studied Computer, we used wire wrapping a lot. Great for prototyping.
The PDP 8 was the first mini computer in the world, which means that it was much smaller then previous computers.It could be bought by a research group in a University, in the offices. Not like the previous computer.
Yes, a mini computer back then weight about 200-300 kg, might have a HD and probably tapes as storage. And several terminals to work from.
The PDP-8 was built by wire wrapping flip chips together. Those was basically the same functions in later TTL chip, but by discrete components on a PCB. PDP-11 was also a mini computer, but PDP-8 was a 12 bit computer, and the PDP-11 was a 16 bit computer, and it was inspiration for the 68000 CPU:s.
I used to work for DEC. So I know parts of the history. But most of it using VAX computers and clusters
The old is new again! I did wire wrapping for many projects in the 70s. Very easy and reliable. I still use my gold tool today. Great to see you introducing the technology to new users. Great video as usual.
Thank you!
Thanks for keeping these old-school techniques alive, it never hurts to have numerous options. And there's a kind of spooky artistic-ness to it, it just looks cool on the bigger boards with more wiring. Great vid as usual!
It maybe looks more complicated than it is...
With the re-growing community of electronic hobby-enthusiasts, this wire wrapping technology along with the "Fädeltechnik" using wiring pencils, these almost forgotten techs do experience a sort of a revival. WhenI was 14 (long time ago) I had built a wiring pencil from a full metal emptied ballpen core/refill (remove color and ball, clean it). The sharp ring at the tip is great for cutting the wire after soldering, by just pressing it to the lead. I still use it and can prototype quite fast with it. You can go from pin to pin with it. Turn at least one wrap around, then go to the next... Signal per Signal can be completed by this in a fast manner. A tiny holding contraption to fixate the wire while wrapping around a pin was quickly set up, also the holder for the tiny wire coil at the end of the pen.
I remember the "Fädeltechnik", too. As you write, the tools were cheaper than for wire-wrapping. But AFAIK it was not used in products.
Riesigen Dank, dass Du mich über das Video auf diese Technik gebracht hast. Ich bin Hobbyist und habe oft bei Prototypen irgendwelche Fehler drin gehabt, die sich bereits gelötet schlecht reparieren ließen. Beim Wire Wrapping kann man wunderbar nachbessern.
Das ist sicher ein Vorteil...
I also like wire wrap for any experimental work - in the time it takes to find and heat up an iron, I've already connected the board :)
Another advantage!
My wire wrapping tool arrived today and I have to say, beats duponts anyday. I love this technic and you can really makes things look organised. Well worth the time to invest in
Thank you for your feedback!
Remembering drooling over the tools in my Tandy books and catalogs way back then, but ended up buying a soldering iron
They do nor replace a soldering iron. So you made a good decision
I worked for the the Italian division of the German Industrial automation company Hartman& Braun for 13 years, for several years from 1987 I worked on the Contronic 3 automation system for power stations, a project could be formed by about 50 two meter tall cabinets filled with eurocard size electronic cards all wire wrapped on the back plane, I was in the testing department, and had quite a job correcting wiring and simulating operations. Luckily we got two computer controlled machines that were capable together with an operator to reduce a two week cabling job on a cabinet to two days, with near zero mistakes reducing drastically my time for checking.
Today we use DCS and 99% of the wireing has been substituted with SW.
I think we are all glad we do no more need extensive wire wrapping. But sometimes it still can help.
@@AndreasSpiess I'm not using wire wrap for my prototypes, for quick prototypes I prefer using copper strip pre drilled breadboards, I use a 3mm drill bit to interrupt the copper strips where needed and use wire wrap wire cut to size for jumps.
I'm also use the UV Positive Photoresist and etching method, and the CNC milling and drilling method.
That small black piece of steel in the middle of the handle is a wire stripper. Push the wire through, slide it into the slot and pull the insulation off. You MUST insert the wire so that when you pull, the cutting blade presses onto the body of the tool. Get it the wrong way round and you will bend the blade.
You can get wrapping wire that doesn't need stripping, but you need special pins with square edges that bite into the insulation.
In the 1970s I worked for Burroughs Machines who had terminals in every branch of NatWest, Barclays, Midland and Yorkshire banks, and it was a regular task to do modifications to the wire-wrapped backplane.
You are right about the stripper. However, I never liked it :-(
I am not sure if you still get this "special" wire. But it was very handy.
And indeed, even some "programming" was done back then on the backplane by changing wires. I just watched a video about the restauration of a PDP11 with lots of wire wraps...
@@AndreasSpiess I haven't done any wire wrapping since the 1980s, I gave all my wrapping stuff away, something I now regret as I'm thinking about using it for prototyping. I'm not too keen on breadboards.
Did you ever use the the method wrapping where you didn't need to strip the insulation? The pins were square in section with sharp corners which pierced the insulation as you performed the wrap. IIRC the wire was a special type too.
@@rogerbarton1790 I think we had such wires back then. But as with you, it is a long time ago ;-)
The tool you buy on Aliexpress has a wire stripper integrated in the handle.
You can DIY a toold by drilling a small hole on the side near the end if a small tube, such as the plastic tube from a q-tip, or a in pen lead.
Feed the wire from the end through the inside of the tube and the hole you drilled.
I know of the integrated stripper, but I did not like it. Maybe I was using it the wrong way...
Very reliable. I used it around 1980 to build a 8 kByte memory expansion board for my Commodore PET 2001. I designed it myself and it still worked when I last tried it 3 years ago. The base was a Eurocard(?). All IC's went in wirewrapping DIL sockets. The only soldering was for a connector, the IC power pins and the decoupling capacitors for all the ICs.
This was how we did it back then. Lots of parallel address and data lines. It is interesting that many of these boards survived somehow...
You brought me back to my internship in the 80's. Thank you. I still have these tools and they're excellent. I also recommend. Reliable computers like PDP I have worked with were wired wrapped. Memories...
I am glad this video initialized so many memories !
Wow, this is incredible!
Indeed this was an interesting technology and huge computers were built like that.
Glad to see this video. This is exactly how all our prototype and small quantity boards were made. We also added conformal coat to secure and isolate the pin side of a board. If coated and in need of modification, you have to use a solvent to remove the coat. I'm not a fan of Dupont wires because it is too easy for them to become loose and of course the 1 to 1 issue but everything has its uses.
I never heard about using a conformal coating on wire wrapped boards!
The main disadvantage is that it builds height and the long pins has a risk of bending, causing short-circuits. I prefer soldering and use a small piece of experimental circuit board for external components. Another method I've used is experimental boards and solder using wire wrapping wire. Since this wire is so thin, it's rather easy to add more connections later since you can easily have 4-5 wires in the same hole. Heat up again with the soldering iron, stick in another wire. Doesn't build height.
This is another use of these wires. A few viewers mentioned they do it this way,
What an amazing discovery! Literally saves a lot of time and creates new opportunities. Thank you for bringing it up, Andreas!
You are welcome!
I still have a Z80 system I made this way - wire wrap was my go to method for prototyping. But a sea of blue wires could be a problem when debugging so thanks for the tip of using coloured wires. I will now track down my old WW tool...
Back in the early 80s I made quite complex Z80 and 6502 systems using wire-wrap IC sockets and thousands of wires. Very tedious but eventually satisfying when it worked. I still use the same wire for jumpers as it's coated in high-temperature plastic and very easy to solder. Just yesterday I was wire wrapping a couple of small DC-DC converter modules onto a board.
The Chinese Wires are not very heat-resistant. But colored ;-)
I think the wire we originally used was 30 AWG, the conductor was silver coated with teflon insulation. No internet and very little mail-order back then so we had to go through manufacturers agents, wait long delivery times and pay high prices. We used hand tools for wire wrap IC sockets and connectors on boards but had electric tools for the larger size wiring between panels.
Another technique we used was to plan out CPU-RAM-EPROM-IO wiring between sockets then cut-twist-solder wire-wrap wire using standard IC sockets. A lot of it was data and address bus runs so easily duplicated. This method made a lower profile and more robust board. These boards were only clocked at 2-4MHz so wire layout wasn't too much of an issue for one-off industrial controllers.
I learned wire wrapping many years ago. I still find it very useful.
That is why I thought I show it also to the younger people
I spent many hours wire-wrapping in the 70's - I then rewrapped a VAX 11/780 backplane in 1989 - tens of thousands of wraps over a week because there was no replacement in Europe - got 3 wraps wrong in all of those - I wouldnt ever want to go back to it :)
I can imagine... But back then we did not have multi-layered PCBs and high-density ICs. So it was probably the only way to do so many connections in a small space.
Wow i cant imagine how much time that took. Just amazing
Indeed!
Hi Andreas, glad my tip made into your well organised video overview, congrats! I enjoyed the benefits of wire wrap in many projects and I am happy that it gets a broader attention! Thanks for showing my name in your video detail, as as I said: the technology is old, but fortunately the wires do not know about that....
You are welcome! If you read the comments this technology is very well known. But forgotten somehow... I think we helped many good memories to re-appear.
I still use wire wrapping today for digital logic circuit prototyping! I have an automatic wire wrapping gun and wire strippers specifically for wire wrap wire which cuts and strips the correct length of insulation. Made quite a few one off production units for customers back in the 80's just using EUROCARD size wire wrap boards!
So you are equipped much better than I am! I only use it to replace Dupont wires, so the tool is ok for these few wraps.
The wire wrapping tool comes with its own wire stripper. It's the one on the hole near the center of the handle. It's perfect for AWG #30.
You are right. But I did not like it...
This technology is still in common use in the telecom industry on wire frames. Yes we use slightly lager wire (22 to 24) gauge.
Really? Insulation displacement connections like Krone is super common but haven’t seen wire wrap blocks in telcos for YEARS.
As a matter of interest, where have you seen this used recently?
@@tonysouthern3017 Not who you asked, but I was re-working some T1s on a DSX last week and had to break out my wire wrap tools for the job.
I work for a major telecom in the midwest and still have some solder blocks.
@@tonysouthern3017 The reason is just that ther are old installations out there. I live also in Switzerland like Andreas does and was a former Electrician (they do most of the "wire" part of telecommunication infrastructures), and I worked on modern Terminals like the VS system from Reichle de Massari (R&M) which is really REALLY easy to use and extremely fast. And I had to solder or wirewrap on older Terminals, some are with screw terminals etc... and I worked mostly in one small City with around 25'000 citizens.
And if you know that like I do, it's really not surprising why DSL (which uses these connections) has so much trouble with speed and reliability ^^
Wonderful tool. it save lots of time. Thank you for recording the video.
You are welcome!
Yes. I’ll use this. Great. I once in 1978 did a student job at Siemens Augsburg in fehlersuche of wire wrapped mainframe boards.
Finding errors was not easy. And correcting it sometimes also not...
@@AndreasSpiess well, at Siemens the wrapped boards were put in a machine which tested all connections and output an ist-soll vergleich. Zb connection from AB12 to BC06 shouldn’t be there. Or D12 to BC34 is not present. Then I put high voltage on connections that should not be there to get rid of residue. And I wrapped missing connections. An I ate a lot of zwetchendatchi with the women in Fehlersuche ;-)
@@AlexSlaets I had to google "Zwetschgendatschi" ;-)
1:40 THAT is the coolest thing I've seen in a long time. Cheers! Chris.
I found it by chance. And as an old DEC employee of course I liked it ;-)
This is something i want to try someday in future because i am too young to remember use of this. Thanks for links.
Oh man! this reminds me of digital transmissions X-connections of the 90s! One more tip for beginners: the black sharp metal piece placed at the side of the wire wrapping tool is to peel off plastic covers of the wire, no extra tool is required.
You are right. I tried it but did not like it :-(
In the 80's I worked at Singer - Link Flight Simulation translating schematics to wire wrapping lists for the factory workers to wire wrap backplanes and circuit cards. I still use it for occasional personal projects.
Obviously, this technology was used in many industries...
That was interesting, and maybe even useful. I'll admit, I had forgotten about wire wrapping myself!
You are not the only if I read the comments!
The first electronic telephone switch that I worked on, an ITT-TE-400G, was totally built using wire wrap. You even "programmed" hunt groups by wire wrapping various pins together. I have also built dozens of IC based projects using wire wrap. I think I wore out at least two of the hobby type battery powered tools. I still have the manual tools and occasionally use them on Arduino projects similar to what he shows in the video.
Today configuration is easier. Just click a few buttons on the screen and store the new configuration on the device ;-)
Ah happy days with my automatic wire wrap gun. It cut, stripped and wrapped all in a single, rapid move. As you say the joints were as good as solder as they were 'gas tight' around the corners of the pins.
We also had to do much more wraps per hour. So automation was needed...
Never done wire-wrapping..but these are what I use to 'wire' my prototype circuits(protoboards/dual layer) with soldering.
A few viewers do it the same way.
Was in telecoms in the 70s most connections were wire wrapped. The electric wire wrappers also stripped the wires. The actual wire when wrapped well form as a cold weld to the corners of the pins and if you find an old wrapped board and unwind the wire when it gets to a corner you can sometimes here a faint ping and feel more resistance at that point.
I read that the telecom industry was the first to use it.
Your wire wrapping tool includes a wire stripper in the center. Just thread it through the wide side and pull it down. Also I use another bigger size tool to wrap breadboard size wires. Much easier than soldering. Surprisingly reliable as well.
I did not like the built-in wire stripper
I am absolutely going to try this out.
Enjoy it!
There was a system that use self-fluxing enamelled copper wire. You had a small spool of the stuff on the end of a hollow wiring pen, the wire went down the centre of the "pen" and came out at the "nib", you soldered the wire at the starting point and moved from point to point, soldering as you went along.
I used this too. But it was more complicated…
@@AndreasSpiess Yea, I didn't really get on with it, I still have a virtually full reel of wire which is about 40 years old. You had to use more heat than with tinned copper wire and the residue was dirty.
Great video. I've been wire wrapping my prototypes since the seventies. It is much more convenient than etching pubs and the project is testable quickly.
PCBs these days also became quite comfortable. But for special purposes this old tech is still good :-)
Nice video. I still have my wire wrapping tool I bought from Radio Shack when I was a teenager about 30 years ago. It still gets used today. Also do not restrict yourself to just 30 gauge wire. If the wire fits it in the tool you can wrap it. I use it quite often to make small wire harnesses. For a more permanent connection I will solder the wire and add a bit of hot melt glue for strain relief.
Thank you for the tips!
The biggest factor in tool size is if it will fit between the pins of the connector. I have a 22 gauge that absolutely won't - you have to bend the pins to get it to fit. I bought 24 gauge solid wire for a few projects so i could solder directly to a D1 mini. 24 gauge wire wrap tool would probably be too big too. 30 or 28 maybe
I used this wiring method during a project at my university and I must say that it is a reliable way to connect components but we had a wiring gun to rolling wires and used the other tool to remove the wires.
We used different tools back then. But many of them are no more produced or very expensive
You had me at two wires on one pin. Another great video - thanks!
Sometimes even more...
Wonderful video reminding me of good times doing EE lab projects at university. We were even given electric wire wrapping machine. And hours spend troubleshooting mistakes in sticking to the wiring lists...
I think you still get these machines. But they are very expensive...
Andreas Spiess yes indeed, I believe we were told the cost was 700 USD (1975 USD) !
Just another gent who did a lot of wire rapping in the '70s. Much easier with a mains powered tool and a good wire stripper with a length guide. If I recall correctly there was even some instances of larger pins and wires for higher currents. Using round pins is not ideal, it's the sharp edges of the square pin biting into the solid copper wire that makes the joint so reliable.
I agree with the power tool and the square pins! For a small amount of connections, the manual tool is ok. But for a computer backplane...
3:12 Whoa. Didn't expect the very cheapest listing of that little tool to be the cost of 4 units of esp32. Decisions, decisions for a student to make 😅
Maybe the manufacturing series are not as big as for the ESP32 ;-)
I had ARPANET IMP #17 at our site at the U of MD back in the day in one of my computer rooms, and I operated the first ARPANET/NSFNET interconnects with it. (On a MicroVAX-II, sorry no wire-wrap in that beast.) Though I think I recall doing some wire-wraps on a UNIBUS backplane when we didn't have any bus-grant cards available.. And on a bunch of boards, you selected options/addresses/etc using wire-wrap jumpers between pins rather than those expensive DIP switches that took up a lot more room, too.
VAX was more my time at DEC. I wrote my Ph.D. work on my VAXstation in WYSIWYG. The employees sometimes were able to buy one for cheap :-)
We had to do wire wrapping at Electronic school. I was wondering what that tool was in my tool box. Thanks Andreas. Have a great day.
I did also back in the 90's and still have the tool :)
Wire wrap wire can also be used as bodge wire to repair broken tracks.
I have many viewers with similar experiences. Probably all older than 30 ;-)
@@AndreasSpiess Remember the circuitboard stand with lead for the base mate. I said you needed gold. Well found some more Andreas.
I wonder when you will retire, lucky guy ;-)
The tool and the wire wrap wire has been laying in my workshop for year, newer tried it.
This video was great, I now know how to use it :)
Thanks!
You are welcome!
I use wire wrap at my day job to build automated test equipment for pcb and electronics testing. It's perfect for all one off jobs and for what i do way better than soldering. Learned it fom my old college (and mentor). Thumb up for the technique and this great video ;)
Thank you!
1:32 if you order vintage aviation parts that are decommissioned, you’ll see atleast some of these components use this method. I’m holding a piece of a retired control panel now that’s got 30 analog inputs using wire wrap
It is interesting where this technology was used. It looks like unreliable but obviously was very reliable...
Thanks for the memories. My first micro was a wire wrapped 6502... which was a bit of a pain, as the 6502 was just the processor, no memory or peripherals or even clock like the modern microcontrollers. But (eventually) it worked!
Long time ago :-)
Thanks for this, I did not know it was still possible to buy the tool and wire to do this. I just purchased what you demonstrated, it arrived today, and works great.
Thanks again for all your great videos, with so much useful information.
Thank you for your feedback!
I made my first z80 based home computer on wire wrap boards.
Used a cut-strip-wrap tool I think, or at least I used soft insulation wire, as I didn’t need cutters or strippers.
A few other viewers also described this technology. I newer used it.
Wire wrapping is still used in the telecommunications industry for cross-connecting T1 DSX (patch panels).
These use 22AWG 5 conductor wire and a similar tool (clearly slightly larger to acommodate the larger wire)
Though it is rapidly disappearing as discrete T1 circuits are seldom installed any more.
I think software configuration is faster and can be done remotely which is a big advantage these days...
@@AndreasSpiess Absolutely. Plus these days a T1 (and the to the E1 in your part of the world) is considered a very low speed circuit. And is becoming obsolete as telephone system transmission moves away from TDM to more flexible packet based .
Wire wrapped TMS32010 DSP board design for degree, worked extremely well, great tech for the time and still viable for one offs/development.
Or at least to replace some Dupont wires if your device works and you want to deploy it...
Wow, so oldschool! :)
:-))
I still have my wire wrap tools, both manual and battery powered and some wire wrap IC sockets. I occasionally use them, though Dupont cables are my "go to" for quick Arduino projects, simply because of the female headers on the boards. If I want a "permanent" prototype and it is digital, I will consider wire wrap. However, analog circuits can develop unexpected issues when wire wrap is used, so I avoid it for analog circuits. Resistors are a pain and decoupling capacitors should be soldered in place, even in wrapped designs.
Can you tell me if the connection gets worse if the contacts (pins) are used multiple times? In my training at the power station, we dismantled a switchgear and it was possible to change the pins there.
If the pins (posts) were designed for wire wrap, they are fairly hard (tougher than conventional pins), with square posts, and may be used/reused multiple times. Of course, eventually they may show some wear. If the "switch gear" is the sort used for old telephone systems, then it is designed for lots of reuse. If it is something else, then "maybe?"
I totally agree with the caps.
Excellent video. Wirewrapping is a technique that should not be forgotten.
You did not mention that the pins can not be round, they need to be square
so that the edges cuts into the wire and creates a good airtight connection (4 for each turn actually).
There were some discussions around the pins. square works much better, but for hobby usage, I also du sometimes round ones. And solder them if they are not good ;-)
A really nice addition to that fast wiring method is also those "self-adhesive elastic bandage" or in german "schnellpflaster" (google). They are perfect for wraping around PCB's to secure loose wires and also wraping several PCB's together. They also can be reused and you can use them for allmost everything ( dipping it into 2 component glues and wrap it around something, to wrap around handles etc.) i absolutley love them and it is a great enrichment for a makers lab :-)
Good tips. Thank you!
excellent. I love that in more and more industries, going back to old technology and even old ways (growing your own e coli free lettuce, preserving food, wire wrapping etc.) are in many cases low tech but superior.
I am still happy we have the new technology ;-)
Wow, it’s so cool that the OK Industries Wire-Wrap tool (that you linked) appears to be unchanged from the one I bought in the 70’s. :)
I built several of my first 6800 & 6809 based micro systems completely wire-wrapped with an OK JW-1 "Just Wrap” tool (which I still have).
The JW-1 tool was really fast, as no wire stripping required. The post corners cut through the kynar insulation while wrapping, for reliable connection.
It was awesome making really dense DIP based designs on Eurocard square pad boards, with DIN 41612 connectors to a rack mounted Vero backplane.
I found a Eurocard 41612 extender card in the attic the other day! Maybe useful again!
For complete cards, it is probably easier to order a multi-layered PCB these days... But back then these were not available....
Somehow your video's keep costing me money. But as it is well spend, it is no problem. Thank you for the video!
You are welcome! My videos also cost me money ;-) But I rather spend it on these little gadgets than for things like cigarettes or extensive alcohol...
Hi Andreas, I remember using battery powered wirewrap guns. They speeded up production immensly but neede some practice to get right.
We also had those. But they are quite expensive these days, I think.
I also like using the wire wrapping technique for my projects and I am using the same tool made by OK. However, the tool has a step right behind the insertion channel which tends to kink the wire when it is inserted. I filed that step down and polished it with rouge to form a smooth ramp.
With that modification, the tool works perfectly for me.
One hint: use the square pin headers for ww, the round ones don’t work reliably.
But you can add some solder if you have to.
Thanks for the tip about the ramp. I think, I will do it too.
I still use this in my projects, they are Highly reliable
:-)
Shockingly I was only born in the early 70s so wire wrapping wasn't something I did while it was in heavy use, though when I started prototyping using PIC microcontrollers in the early 90s I built some boards that still work today. If I liked the design, I used to go round and solder it as I always felt it was more secure, though the couple of boards I didn't solder still worked for years.
Thanks for this reminder, I ought to dig out my old tool, I know I have a couple of spools of the wire somewhere too. :-)
I think this technique is just as relevant today as it ever was and given the difficulty in buying really good quality breadboards (like those RS used to sell) I am often frustrated trying to use them in breadboards, so often end up skipping to Veroboard or 'dead bug' instead.
I think we had a"rush to the bottom" in Breadboards. Because it is hard to show quality differences in a picture most people just bought the cheapest and the quality manufacturers were not able to survive...
@@AndreasSpiess yes, I think you are right. I find myself looking for old ones from the 90s and hoping they are still in good condition, it's a sbame.
Thanks for you video. I though those tools where not available for years anymore. I am going to order on right now.
You are welcome!
Personally, I find the Verowire system to be superior to the wire-wrap system. It doesn't need long wire-wrap pins for every component, so the resulting board can be much thinner, and neater, and the electrical connections are soldered rather than friction-based. The fine enamelled wires between components are bundled together and routed as busses using plastic verowire "combs" that push into the 0.1" pitch holes on square-pad veroboard. I use a thicker gauge of enamelled wire for the power rails, and then the vero-pen spools of fine wire for the signal connections,
Pro-tip: After pushing the comb's plastic mounting pins through the board from below, you use a soldering iron to melt the top of the plastic mounting pins, which rivets the comb to the board and stops them moving or coming lose.
You are right. Every system has its advantages and disadvantages. I also used these enameled wires and did not like them too much. Especially if I needed more than one wire to a pin.