Pin Headers - soldering, cutting, male, female, etc.

hi gang I'm gonna talk to you about working with pin headers both male and female a lot of projects these days involve working with manufactured boards these boards have headers on them that you connect to such as this Arduino and this Raspberry Pi as a result your homemade boards also have these headers so here's how to add headers to your boards and a bit about the jumper wires that connect them I'll start with these male pin headers male headers are the type you see on the Raspberry Pi you connect to them using female connectors like this or by plugging in another board like this what's called stacking or you might have a board that has the pins underneath and you're expected to plug that in somewhere I'll use this level shifter board as an example it's meant to work with these male headers you can see it has no screw holes for mounting it instead you're expected to solder these pin headers to it and then put it in a socket of some sort or breadboard these male pin headers came with it but you can also make your own there are many places you can order them online such as eBay Adafruit and spark fun to give you some examples make sure you get headers with the right spacing these pins are 0.1 inches or 2.5 4 millimeters apart which is also the spacing that the Raspberry Pi boards use these are called breakaway headers because you can just count out how many you need and simply break them away here I'm using pliers to grip them to solder the pin headers to the board one technique is to put the headers in a breadboard then put the board on the pins that way you can be sure the pins will be on straight use a soldering iron with a pointy tip and some solder that has rosin in it such as rosin core solder or in my case this spool has RA written on it which means rosin activated with the soldering iron heated up put a little solder on the iron just to help with heat conduction then briefly touch both the circular metal pad on the board and the pin at the same time and apply some solder the solder should flow onto the pin and the pad you should end up with solder on both and a nice cone shape not a ball and here's the result it would fit in a breadboard nicely without too much effort notice that none of the solder is connecting two pins together and they all look good but if you want to you can test them anyway using a meter I first put a wire with alligator clips on either of the probes that's so that I can can to a wire that I can plug into the breadboard holes easily then I set the meter to measure resistance and push the button that will make it beep when there's a good connection this is called a continuity test note that the board is spanning the gap on the breadboard with one row of pins on one side and the other row of pins on the other side that way these pins are connected to these holes and these pins are connected to these holes then I put the wire in one hole and test the pin that's connected to that hole lutely you may find that two pins seem to be connected together but in this case that's because they are connected together on the board itself in this case they're both marked as ground pins though there may be other reasons to test both rows of pins female pin hitters are the type you see on an Arduino Uno board you connect to them using male connectors like this or by plugging in another board again called stacking for an example I'll again use the level shifter board I just work with as I said it has no screw holes for mounting it instead you're expected to plug it into a breadboard or into a socket of some form like this one which I'll show you how to make I'll use this perf board to put it all on there are many variations of perf board these are the female pin headers I'll use again you can buy them online from places like eBay Adafruit Sparkfun and others and again make sure you get ones with the correct distance from hole to hole this board needs 0.1 inch or 2.5 4 millimeters so that's what these headers are for the board I'll need 2 rows of 6 to cut the headers count out the number of holes you need 6 in my case then use some pliers or something to pull out the pin for the next one the seventh in my case that leaves a wide section between the pins use a set of cutters to cut along the middle of that section then use a knife or sandpaper or a file to clean the edges cut just clean away the extra that sticks out that was part of the hole you just cut through next with the headers on the board and put the board in place with the pins all the way in the holes in the perf board use hot glue or epoxy to glue the headers to the perf board hot glue the insides too I also make some sort of mark for which way the circuit board goes in once other things are connected I'm putting a G here since the ground pins will play in there at this point with the board removed start soldering to the pins but I'm not doing that instead I put two rolls of male pin headers on hot glue them and solder wires from the board's rows to those rows and of course I test that to here's what it looks like underneath I also drill some holes for putting screws later for mounting this somewhere I'd normally also put some sort of labels saying what each hole is for but the circuit board already does that here besides plugging boards into headers you can connect things together using jumper wires you can buy jumper wires with male or female connectors or a mix of both these are 0.1 inch wide and have 28 gauge wires you can buy these online at the usual places such as eBay Adafruit sparkfun and so on and here's connecting the finished level shifter board into a circuit you can see some more examples of headers in use on my bb-8 droid for a hc-05 board and an inertial measurement unit board well thanks for watching see my youtube channel for more informative videos like this you can support these videos either through patreon or through a one-time donation and if you like these videos don't forget to 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Channel: RimstarOrg

Views: 257,515

Keywords: pin header, header, breakaway headers, header pin, female header, male header, solder header, solder pin header, how-to, jumper wire, cable interconnect, electronics

Id: qz9Ryos1_GY

Length: 5min 46sec (346 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 24 2017