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Make Your Own Jupmer Wires for Electronic Breadboard

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Note: After starting the 'Tips and Tricks' section I wanted to do my own 'tutorial'. So, here's my first attempt of it. Hope you all find this useful, and sorry about the low quality of the photographs, my camera is just a 2MP.

If you, like me, like to experiment with electronics, then you'd probably use an electronic breadboard (also known as protoboard or project-board). These allow you to construct and test circuits without the need to permanently soldering the components.

The problem with these is that you have to use wires to connect the components across the bus lines. We normally use single core circuit wires for this purpose, but they tend to bend, break and get stuck in the breadboard when used repeatedly. This may cause short circuiting the bus lines and could be the failure of your circuit.

A better option would be to buy a 'Breadboard Jumper Wire' kit, such as this.

A Breadboard Jumper Wire Kit

These have sets of wire of different length which have connectors attached to the ends. But these can be hard to find in local electronic shops and can be quite expensive for their value. Because of these problems, I was searching a way to make jumper cables on my own, and this is what I came up with.




What you need?

 The main parts you need are these connectors. The shop I bought these named them as 'PCB Connectors' (If you know another name for these, please post them in the comments). These are quite common in electronic shops, so you won't have trouble finding some.

PCB Connectors
Other things you'll need:

What you need

  • Circuit Wire
  • Wire Cutters
  • Soldering Iron and Solder
  • Masking Tape
  • A Small Vise (or something to hold the small connectors while soldering)

Lets Start Building...

  • Use the wire cutters to separate the small connectors in the PCB connector
  • Get piece of circuit wire and solder two connectors to each end. You can use the vise to hold the connectors while soldering.
Use the vise to hold the connectors

Soldered connector
Solder two connectors to each end of wire
  • Use a piece of masking tape to cover the soldered point 
Cover the soldered point with masking tape
  • Make few more of these, for different lengths.
Our home-made connectors at work
Now you have a set of your own home-made jumper wires. So, happy experimenting. :)

References 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breadboard
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Comments

  1. Sandeep EllawalaJanuary 20, 2011 at 10:24 AM

    This is brilliant Timi! Wow!!! This is what it's all about. Simple, clear and informative... basically it's wonderful!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thimira AmaratungaJanuary 20, 2011 at 10:54 AM

    Thanks bro :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sam BJanuary 20, 2011 at 11:14 AM

    machan the connectors are called headers as I know

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thimira AmaratungaJanuary 20, 2011 at 11:32 AM

    Thanks :) I'll update the post with that name

    ReplyDelete
  5. Harsha WijesooriyaJanuary 20, 2011 at 11:13 PM

    If your looking to save a few dollars you can always pick up some CAT3/CAT5 (ethernet,phone) wire from your local hardware store for just over a Rs.100 per foot. The good thing is that it consists of 8 pieces/different colours/8 feet in total of AWG22/24? wire perfect for bread boarding

    ReplyDelete
  6. Harsha WijesooriyaJanuary 20, 2011 at 11:15 PM

    also instead of those connectors, you can use some heat sink tubes. then you can just use a lighter!

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thimira AmaratungaJanuary 21, 2011 at 9:11 AM

    Can you explain the use of heat sink tubes?

    Using wires from network cables are easy and economical. But, as I mentioned above, the main problem with them is that when we use them repeatedly, the exposed wire end tend to weaken and will start to bend when inserting to the breadboard and get stuck or break when trying to remove. We'll have to cut off the weaken end and re-expose the wire after every few uses. That's why we need a solid connector at the end of the wire to avoid that problem.

    If we can replace the connectors with something less expensive (connectors cost about Rs.30/=, enough for 20 jumper wires) it would be ideal.

    ReplyDelete

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