My Favourite Board Connectors

In most of my last projects, I used nice miniature connectors from TE. This is, again, no sponsored post. If you ever evaluated connectors, you may know how overwhelming the range of products is. I like to introduce these connectors to you, in the hope you find them as useful as I do. 😅

I first used the Micro-MaTch connectors in the Air-Monitor project. In this project, I had to connect 10 traces between two boards. There was very little space and after several design iterations, I found the Micro-MaTch connectors from TE.

The connector is very small – 8-pin, female SMD version.

Since then, I am using these connectors. They take very little space on the board which simplifies the routing and allowing very compact boards. Also, because they use SMD pads, all other layers below can be used for routing or components.

The matching male connector can be easily assembled using a hammer.

My Requirements

I had a number of requirements:

The connector has to be hand-solderable.
There has to be an SMD variant of the connector.
I like to have a male connector on the board side, to prevent accidental shorts if it gets in contact with a wire or metal part.
I like to assemble the connector by hand, without an expensive tool.
They have to be cheap, less than $1 per connection, even in small quantities.

Connecting Sensor Boards

In the Always-On project, I use eight-pin connectors to connect sensor and logic boards. These connectors fit into very small enclosures. The sensor board shown above is just 40 x 40 mm. There are pads for two connectors to chain multiple boards.

The photo above shows a very simple display board on the wall with four LEDs. It uses an IO expander chip, connected over an I2C bus. The eight-line design works great with unshielded and shielded Ethernet cables over longer distances.