First of all, both to describe what I need, and for anyone else that needs the same thing, I was pretty lucky I think to find these 6 position connectors with pins and about 6-1/2" wire per-assembled long on adafruit.com
And, I'm aware that some suppliers also sell similar ribbons with individual (one pin) connectors on each side. But I would like to find something like the adafruit's offering in 2,3, and 4 position single row female ends.
Sadly, I recently bought quite a variety of latching male and female single row connectors from Molex, not realizing that without their crimping tool (which costs over $300 USD!!!!!), its VERY hard to wire your own single row connectors, and end up with reliable results.
I just grabbed the first result I found for each product. Do some shopping around to see if there is a better price.
It's very easy to tear off the number of wires you need from the ribbon cable and push the connector inserts into the housing. You only need to make sure the housing is in the right orientation so that the little plastic latch engages on the connector insert.
You can also just buy ribbon cable and the connector inserts separately with a Dupont connector crimp tool. You can get the crimp tools pretty cheap (or you can pay a lot for a good name brand one, I don't know how much difference there is). Even after quite a bit of practice, I still haven't gotten fast at crimping those things, it's very slow going for me. So it's definitely nice to go with pre-crimped if you can work with that standard length.
I much prefer to use the IDC connectors when possible. It's so fast and easy making those cables and I don't think there's much chance that a cheap IDC connector tool will provide inferior results.
Awesome @Pert! Yeah a bundle of pre-crimpted wires at least will be more reliable. I've been getting pretty bad at googl-ing anything to do with connectors lately, often because I don't know the proper names for them. I'll definitely look at those.
I'm also pretty embarrassed I didn't find anything at sparkfun the first time I looked. Now I know... the critical search phrases are "single row" and "board to board", and here's a whole page of ready made ones...
Often I need things like this, not to go from one board to another, but to connect from a board to external things like switches, off-board relays, LCDs, or connections to jacks to the outside world. So in those cases, ready made board to board jumpers can be conveniently cut in half and used 2X. Yeah, there's the orientation issue. I usually burn a tiny dot into one end of the connector with a soldering iron, on whatever side I'm calling top. If I remember, I also try to put similar dots on my PCB silkscreens.
I always used to use ICD connectors for dual row headers. For those, I can just clip on the back, pass a ribbon through, and "crimp" the whole thing in a vise. (LOL!).
Not knowing the right terms for this sort of stuff is really a problem. Once you stumble across that word everything get much easier. It took me a while to learn terms like "Dupont" and "IDC".
I bought some paint markers that I use to mark one end of every header and cable to determine correct orientation at a glance.
pert:
Not knowing the right terms for this sort of stuff is really a problem. Once you stumble across that word everything get much easier. It took me a while to learn terms like "Dupont" and "IDC".
I bought some paint markers that I use to mark one end of every header and cable to determine correct orientation at a glance.
That's why Google supplies pictures to match your search parameters. Use them to see if you are searching with the correct words.
pert:
What a strange comment. How the hell is Google Image Search going to help if you don't know the correct term to start with?
Because often a very loose and imprecise description will throw up a picture of what you are looking for. Then go to that page and look for other words that describe that thing.
For example last winter I found an icicle embedded in the bird’s drinking bowl. So I searched for “embedded icicle” in images and came across one that looked the same. I went to the page and found the proper name was “ice spike”. Then a search for that showed lots of examples and an explanation of how they formed. I never knew that such a phoneme existed and I had been teaching physics half my working life.
