Six years ago everyone built Big Muffs on perfboard, now it feels like every build I see starts with a $4 fabbed board
I pulled out my first Rat clone last week and the whole thing is point to point on a RadioShack board, ugly as sin but it still rips. Compare that to the dozen builds I scrolled through this morning, all of them with custom PCBs and SMD caps and those little cast aluminum boxes. The change really hit me around 2019, when getting 5 boards spun for $12 stopped being a group buy hassle. Half the reason I got into this was the puzzle of fitting a circuit into whatever enclosure I had lying around, bending leads and swearing at offboard wiring. Now you can order a full kit with a pre drilled box and a color coded wiring diagram and have it done in an afternoon. Is it just me, or does that take some of the fun out of it? Curious if anyone here still perfboards for the heck of it or if I am just yelling at clouds.