DIY probes for plated PCB pin holes.

     When I received my SAMD10 Xplained mini it came with no pins, which makes hooking up to the board a little more difficult. A regular breadboard jumper wire is too loose in the hole and does not make a reliable contact, not to mention how hard it is to heep in place. So I came up with a way to make probes to plug into the plated holes in the PCB reliably and firmly. To make them you only need an old IDE/floppy cable, some wire and either heatshrink tubing or electrical tape. 

    First you take the back plastic piece off the IDE cable connector, this plastic clip keeps the cable in place. You can rip it right off because we don't need it. After you take it out you can then pull off the IDE cable. This leaves you with only a bare connector with some spikes sticking out where the wire used to be. These spikes are the contacts for the IDE connector and they're what we're going to make our probes out of. 

    Secondly, you take a piece of wire and strip both ends, After that you tin both ends of the wire and then solder one end on the spiky end of the contact taken from the IDE connector.

    After this comes the important part, which is squeezing the contact to make it fit into the plated holes in the PCB. To do this you first take pliers press the contacts from their ends to make them come closer. Then you bend them further  so that they overlap. And as a last touch you press from the sides to that they become more in line with each other.

    Now the probe is almost done and all that's left is to isolate it so that it doesn't short out to anything. You can do this with anything you like, for example tape or heatshrink. Maybe even epoxy if you're feeling fancy. I first did it with electrical tape, but the end of the probe ends up a little floppy so when I went to make more I made then with heatshink and they feel much stiffer and easier to insert.



    These probes will fit in just about any board that has plated holes with 2.54mm spacing. Most of this type of holes are the same size so the probes should fit many foards. Using these probes there's no longer a need to solder pins on the boards, especially if you don't have any on hand. Also most of the time the contacts on those IDE connectors are gold plated so bending them in a way that they cross over brings the gold plated surface on the outside. 

Anyways, that's it for now and thanks for visiting my blog.

   

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