DIY Cables

Pololu.com among other places provides crimped cable housings so that you can build custom sized cables. Unfortunately, they do not provide crimp headers for 14 pins or 24 pins, but it is useful for a prototype board if you bring out connects in say 3 pins (data, ground, power) or 4 pins (scl/sda or rx/tx plus ground/power), and then use a custom cable to connect to your device:

• Video explaining about the wires and crimped connectors

Crimp connector housings

Using the crimp connector housings, you can insert either pre-crimped jumper wires of a specific size or crimped wires that you can make of any length. You can insert wires with either male or female crimped headers.

One thing to watch out for is the pin being pushed out of the crimp pin headers, particularly when using breadboards that need some force to insert the male pins. You might consider adding a dab of glue when putting the crimped pin into housing so that the pin doesn't come out.

• General crimp connector housings
• 1 pin crimp header
• 2 pin crimp header
• 3 pin crimp header
• 4 pin crimp header
• 5 pin crimp header

Wires with pre-crimped terminals

You can buy pre-crimped wires of various lengths (1", 2", 3", 6", 12", 24", 36", and 60"). Depending on the length, you can pick 6 or 10 colors for the wires. For example, red wires are typically used for power and black wires are typically used for ground.

• General pre-cut jumper wires with pre-crimped terminals
• Pre-cut jumper wires with male/male crimped pins
• Pre-cut jumper wires with male/female crimped pins
• Pre-cut jumper wires with female/female crimped pins

Building your own crimped jumper wires

You are not limited to jumper wires of a given size. You can make your own wires of any length that you desire.

For crimping your own wires, stranded wires work better than solid wires. Usually you want 22AWG or 24AWG wires.

• Male crimping pins
• Female crimping pins
• Crimping Tool: 0.1-1.0 mm² Capacity, 16-28 AWG
• Crimping Tool: 0.08-0.5 mm² Capacity, 20-28 AWG