#231 7 Tricks on how to wire your Project (e.g. Arduino, ESP8266, ESP32) Dupont wires

as you know microcontroller boards have many pins and wiring them to other components or keeping track of the different wires sometimes it's not easy today I show you how I do it most of the tricks work for all microprocessor boards like the Arduino the esp8266 or the ESP 32 and with a unique feature of the ESP 32 we can even optimize a little more glitzy youtubers here is the guy where the Swiss accent with a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers in this video we will cover the following tips and tricks use colors connect ground first prefabricated wires use empty dupont shells use the right pin order not enough ground or VCC pins on our development boards super glue can help sometimes crimping your own wires so let's start trick number one use colors colors are essential for identifying our wires and I have wires of all colors in my lab but I try to avoid using the same color at several positions in the same project unless I have a lot of wiring there are two exceptions however first I always use black blue or brown for ground in this sequence if I have a black wire ground is black if I have no black blue is ground and only if I have none of those I use brown for grunt why is this important if ground is connected right the chance of a destroyed part is reduced considerably because the fastest way to kill a device is to connect ground to a wrong pin if you do that all voltages are automatically negative compared to ground and for many parts a negative voltage is the fastest way to kill them this is hardly possible if ground is connected correctly so this is a real pain and money savor I use red orange or white wires for DCC also here in this sequence if I have five and 3.3 volts red is always 5 volts and orange 3.3 volt all other colors can be used as you wish tip number 2 follows somehow I try to wire ground first because without any other wires it is less confusing by the way why not always use black for ground this is because of trick number three use prefabricated wires wherever possible you can cut and crimp your two point wires yourself we will have a look at that in tip number eight but you can buy them also prefabricated and dirt cheap which is much faster this is why I have a whole box of such cables and when I need wires I tear as many as required from one of these cables these 40 wire cables always have the same ten colors unfortunately this creates what we know as public toilet problem if you have the same amount of toilets for females and males usually the line in front of the female toilets is much longer at least here in Switzerland everybody knows that they should be built in a different ratio but apparently the architects do not act the same is with two pond wires everybody knows we need much more ground or VCC connections but nobody creates cables with more black and red wires or at least manufactured DuPont cables with 40 black or 40 red wires if I'm wrong please tell me the source of such cables this is why I also use other colors even if I would love to only use black for ground it is a waste cutting measure I own several cable lengths and choose the appropriate one for the purpose if I need a few parallel wires I try to keep them together as a cable unfortunately this is not easy because of my collar rules trick number four is not to use single DuPont connectors because separate connectors are hard to mount and easily disconnect themselves if this happens and you do not recognize it you can lose a lot of time for troubleshooting and if you have to unplug one part from your project because for example you want to replace it with another then you lose a lot of time because you have to reconnect wire after wire and sometimes you get it wrong with the same effect on time loss this is why I use empty shells as much as possible even if I do not plan to use all pins of the device for illustration let's wire our monster motor controller and an ESP 30 to both the motor controller and the ESP 30 to have many pins we need three pins for each motor plus ground and five volts the rest of the pins are unused for our project most people would connect each pin of the ESP 32 to the respective pin on the monster port one after the other the monster port is designed as an Arduino shield and the pins are defined by the manufacturer this is why our example sketch which was written for an Arduino Uno uses these pin definitions if we try to map them to our ESP 32 we see that GPIO 6 2 GPIO 9 are read they are used to connect the flash memory and must not be used by us otherwise the ESP would crash most modern boards do not offer these pins at the pin headers so we could use GPIO 14 to 19 instead this is the result of the conventional wiring single wires which look a little bit like a spider web only if we keep track in our documents we know the order I propose to use empty shells and populate them with our prefabricated wires how many such empty shells do we need for our monster port we need three of them why that as said or the monster board is not we know shield and therefore you cannot use one connector for a whole row the distance here is not 2.5 4 millimeters and the power pins are on the other side of the board for the ESP 32 we need to empty shells one for each side but let's go to trick number 5 first use the right pin order we change the pin assignments in our code let's look at the pins of the do 8 port the pins are pretty mixed up I first concentrate on ground and 5 volts which is labeled V in here these pins cannot be changed both are on the left side and I have a bunch of other GPIO pins on the same side enough for our purpose so I try to concentrate all connections to the left side like that we can omit a connector for the right side the pin assignment looks now like that and the changed definitions in the example sketch like that in Arduino environments pin definitions are usually done using define statements then the sketch would look like that with this trick all connections are on one side of the ESP 32 ports and in a neat order and we can use only one connector cool unfortunately this pin swapping is not always possible with other micro processors because they bind particular functionality to particular pins for example Arduino scan only use a few pins for PWM or the esp8266 has its serial connections at distinct pins with the ESP 32 we can attach functionality to pins as we wish in limits of course all output pins of the ESP 32 for example can be used for PWM the commands are like that and here you can choose the pin we even can change the pins for serial connections with this command and the two pins are here so the chance we can create a neat connector is much higher with an e SP 32 than with an Arduino or an esp8266 the next step is to decide on the size of our connectors for the monster shield we need three connectors connect the one with three pins connect the two with two pins and connector three with four pins that is the minimum I often use empty shells which cover all pins especially if the pins are not connected flush with one end of the pin row for example I could use a 5 pin shell for connector 1 and populate only 2 pins like that it is much harder to connect it wrong and I always place the flat side of the DuPont connector inverts like that I can connect my devices without looking at the schematics and the connector for the ESP 32 it needs 11 pins but I only have empty shells with 1 to 10 pins so I use five and a 6-pin shell and stick them together with adhesive tape you also can use p-touch labels on one side then your connector is even labeled nearly a professional look this is the resulting cable harness created for the connection between the two eight port and the monster shield neat and quite safe in its application this was a long trick with a few phases trick number six is shorter as with black or red colors we often do not have enough pins for ground or VCC here I use pin headers a two point wire cut into two and hot glue to create these connectors also here I use black and red colors as much as possible I even created combined power connectors like that this one for example is used to connect my power supply and that one to connect to my power bank and here you can use trick number seven I only bought single row empty shells and use superglue to stick them together for two row connectors like that you can also create for example a connector for your Raspberry Pi if you need a particular cable length you can use trick number eight you can crimp your wires I use this engineer pae o nine tool if you are interested in finding out why I bought this expensive tool watch my video number 39 and also read some of the comments these are my tricks to cable my projects successfully maybe it helps you to save time in the future or at least create nice-looking projects and maybe you want to add your own one you can do so in the comment I hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you if true please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence you find the links in the description thank you bye

Channel: Andreas Spiess

Views: 85,764

Keywords: pa-09, projeect, Dupont wires, esp8266, esp8266 project, how to, greatscott, ttgo, wifi, eevblog, pa-09 crimper, do-it-yourself, esp32 tutorial, guide, wemos, ESP32 project, iot, hack, nodemcu, Dupont, LORAWAN, crimping, electronics, beginners, esp32, hobby, arduino, engineer pa-09, esp32 project, smart home, simple, arduino project, diy

Id: uYf7vFREV98

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/mudmin]

Love this guy.

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[u/Treczoks]

In general - Good tips.

In detail - Some annotations:

1. For my projects I usually crimp the GND/5V/3.3V wires manually. First of all, to actually have them all in black/red/orange. Second, because I can put two wires into one connector and therefore "daisy chain" this kind of lines, or at least feed two peripherals from one source instead of needing a kind of additional "ground/power rail".

2. Sometimes, my box of DuPont shells does not always provide the right length/pin count. My box here has up to 2x6 pins. A bit of superglue is your friend here.

3. Even if you are using only pins 4,5, and 8 of a connector, use a full length DuPont shell, and just populate the pins you need.

4. Use a white permanent marker or similar means to mark pin 1 on your DuPont shells.

EDIT: Yes, yes, the bot was right...

[u/obeythehypnotoad]

Don't forget wirewrap!