Male-Female Connectors

Projects General Guidance
1

Hi!
I have an arduino UNO with ethernet shield and 433mhz transceiver and lot of output relays. Now, i'm thinking on using on plastic electric box to put all inside and beautifully connected. But i want the box to have no wires directly connected to the outside, i want to have male and female connectors on the exterior to be able to easy remove the box.
The DC power and ethernet I will use a smal extention to the box and then replicate the connector to the outside, but for the sensors do you advise on using any connector in particular? i would love to buy them for cheap on ebay.

thanks!

2

Note, I don't read this forum as much as I used to, so I might not see any replies.

There are many different types of connectors. It depends on what you want to do, how sturdy the connections are, etc.

One is the sensor shields, that bring out most/all pins in rows of 3, with each row having the data, ground, and power option (on some shields, there is an option to provide external power for the power pins). You can pick up servo cables (or make your own) with 3 pins to connect to each device. Here is one such example: http://yourduino.com/sunshop2/index.php?l=product_detail&p=407

If you have the relays in groups of 6, you can use cat-5 cables (each cat-5 cable has 8 wires, but be sure to test it, since some cheapo cables don't have all of the connections), you can use this shield that Adafruit sells: Patch shield for Arduino [v5.01] : ID 256 : $19.50 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.

If you need to send the info to a longer distance, Sparkfun has some servo extensions using cat-6 cables with boosted signals good up to 100 feet: Servo Extension - CAT6 (boosted) - ROB-12272 - SparkFun Electronics

If your box needs to be weather sealed, you can get these RJ-45 cable glands that allow you to plug the cable into the box, and have the insides be protected: Cable Gland - Waterproof RJ-45 / Ethernet connector [RJ-45] : ID 827 : $7.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits.

If you need the cables to be resistant to pulling out, you might look into these wafer headers that allow you to make 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, or 10 wire connections: Straight Wafer Header Male/Female 3,4,5,6,8,10-pin PCB to Wire 6 Types 10/ea - dipmicro electronics

If you want to make your own cables, you can get various sized crimp pin connectors (Pololu - Crimp Connector Housings) and either pre-crimped wires or do your own crimping (the page all of the links) to make custom cables. I like having color coded cables for the different connections.

3

[u]Molex[/u] (or Molex "type") connectors are popular and they come in various sizes and various pin-count configurations, there are panel-mount options and PC board mount options, etc.

Parts Express had a nice picture, but if you live in the U.S. Digi-Key or another large electronics supplier will have a better selection.

The contact pins are normally sold separately, so make sure the pins are compatible with the particular connector housing (check the data sheets). The standard practice is to use male pins in female housings and vice-versa, but they work either way and/or you can mix-and-match. And, buy some extra pins, and maybe extra housings. You might also want a pin-extractor tool (in case you need to re-work something). Sometimes you can remove the pins by using an X-Acto knife to release the catch, but the extractor tool makes it a lot easier.

I haven't had good luck crimping those connectors "at home" with a cheap hobby-crimper, so I usually end-up soldering them. The "real" Molex hand-crimper works well, but it costs a couple hundred dollars.

P.S.
For future reference, you might want to get a printed catalog or two. It's a lot easier to quickly flip-through a catalog to see what's available that to browse the Internet. Jameco has a handy ~200 page catalog, Digi-Key has a massive ~2000 page catalog, Mouser has a catalog (which i don't have).