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 female 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.

Conclusion

Next time you search for connectors, give TE’s Micro-MaTch value line a try. Its connector system solved many problems for me.

If you have any questions, missed any information, or simply want to provide feedback, feel free to comment below. 😄

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5 thoughts on “My Favourite Board Connectors”

Pingback: Favorite board connectors « Adafruit Industries – Makers, hackers, artists, designers and engineers!
dslsecretary says:

2020-10-09 at 16:59

Don’t you mean you like to have a “female” connector on the board to keep down shorts? Your photos show a female socket on the board…

1. Lucky Resistor says:
  
  2020-10-09 at 17:01
  
  Indeed! Thank you for spotting this mistake.
  
budazila says:

2020-10-12 at 22:29

What tool did you use to crimp the connectors on the cable?

1. Lucky Resistor says:
  
  2020-10-12 at 22:55
  
  I used a stack of old PCB boards with a hole for the polarization feature and a hammer (with plastic caps). The flat band cable fits nicely into the connector and is aligned to the right positions. With the hammer and not too much force, the pins will dig into the cables and do a proper connection.
  
  It is important to use a really hard surface to prevent the pins being pushed out of the case. Probably a 3d printed part could prevent any misalignments of the pins, but I did not look into this, because the method with the PCB and hammer worked well so far.