I'm interested in connecting some of my components to my Arduino without a breadboard. I did some goog'ling and it appears that what I need is Female/Female jumper wires (like Jumper Wires Premium 6" F/F Pack of 10 - PRT-08430 - SparkFun Electronics). I'm a big fan of sparkfun but I'm already ordering from another store and I'd rather not pay shipping for just a few wires. This seems like a fundamental part (i.e. connect two wires without solder) but I can't seem to find this anywhere. A lot of these electronic supplier stores don't provide pictures of their items so that doesn't help either. Any ideas? Thanks
You can't use these with the Arduino board. The connectors on the Arduino board are female. At least you would need the male / male connectors they sell too.
I soldered some myself. I had some pin connectors that fit the Arduino boards female connectors. i soldered them to a piece of soft hookupwire, and put heatshrink tubong over the solder joint to prevent shorts when many wires are sitting close to each other. On the other end of the wire i put whatever connector i need for hooking soemthing up. Mostly another male pin connector that will fit in a breadboard. But you could use any connector.
It's a quite tedious job to do the soldering, but the benefit is that the wiers are cheap, and you can make them anay length and color you want.
The component you're looking for, Rappa, is called a 0.025" female crimp pin socket (Molex 16-02-0103); you can get them at Jameco under the part number #100765. You need a crimping tool, too, so what you might want to do to get started is order a complete kit; you can get one from Lynxmotion:
I'm building a version of Arduino that uses post headers for TTL outputs, so these kinds of connectors are very common in my projects.
Just a quick tip: Those connectors are designed to be crimped by huge machines that are able to exert more pressure than you or I ever could, so if you want them to be bullet-proof, sweat a tiny amount of solder onto the connection before you cover it with heat-shrink; humans tend to tug on cables and nothing is more exasperating that pulling a cable and leaving your connector behind....
The crimper solution is good but I would rather have something less permanent (e.g. something that can be plugged/unplugged, just like a breadboard). In the diagram, what I'm interested in is the "mysterious socket connector".
I think you're misunderstanding; the crimp socket crimps on a wire (as in your diagram) and giving you a mobile socket. You can get shells in various configurations (I use 2- and 3-pin shells quite frequently), and when it's just one in I simply protect the socket with heat-shrink tubing.
In the photo below you can see that I've made two such (single-socket) wires; they have a socket on one end and a pin (for plugging into the breadboard) on the other.
It's hard to see, but the connectors near the LEDs are actually 0.025" female sockets that are plugged onto header posts on that board.
In a pinch you could go to a hobby store that specializes in RC components and get a kit for making servo cables -- those are the same type connectors I referenced earlier.
