Purchasing Breadboards
One rule of thumb, you can never have enough breadboards for new projects. I always try to have a few extra on hand. There is nothing more frustrating than having an excited student who wants to start a new project and then telling them they have to wait two weeks for a new shipment to arrive from China.
I recommend finding low-cost breadboards
on eBay. The 1/2 size 400-tie breadboards are
usually fine for beginning projects.
With a little searching, you can usually find them for under $2 each
and you can frequently find prices closer to $1 if you purchase
in quantity 10.
400 tie solderless breadboard search on eBay
There are only a few manufacturers of these breadboards and the package often looks like the following:
Getting a Bad Batch
When you purchase low-price items, these are sometimes "factory seconds" that don't pass all the quality control steps in manufacturing. I have purchased hundreds of breadboards, and in the past, there have been some quality problems with two or three individual boards.
For example, some of the tops of the "bus bar" pins don't get bent correctly and as a result, it is hard to get wires inserted correctly.
Image from Julian Ilet's Video
What do you do? Throw them out. At $1.00 per board, we can afford to lose a few in a large classroom. If you want, you can return them, but the time and hassle to do this is often not worth the effort.
I can assure you that these are rare occurrences for me and I have never got a large order that has more than a single defective board.
Bulk Purchases for a School District
If you are running a larger STEM program, you might want to consider purchasing directly from an electronic distributor such as Alibaba. The minimum quantity is 20 and you have to pay $20 for shipping, but the price per board is only 40 cents each.
