Heya,
I used these (PRT-12639) cute surface mount jacks on other Sparkfun produced boards and found that they were really nice to use. I purchased some to use in my own board designs and find them to be super tight to get headphones in, and also behaving quite intermittent across all of my boards. The soldering to the board appears to be okay, but it seems like the contact from the headphones to the metal contacts inside the jack are not quite touching, despite the fit being tight. Just wondering if anyone else has had this same problem? Can’t decide if these are finicking, sticky jacks or just kinda crappy.
Hi LX,
It sounds like there might be some flexing going on with the housing or pins that is causing that issue. Did you by chance test the fit and connection of the audio jacks prior to soldering them to your boards and they were tight there or was it only after you had soldered them that you noticed the issue? If you did not, do you have any audio jacks left that are not soldered to your boards you could test that with? Also, in your board design, did you use the dimensional drawing from the product page or the Eagle part we have for this for your footprint?
If you have some spares to test and find a similar issue, it might just be you received some defective audio jacks. If you do find the fit is very snug and causing a connection problem even when not on your board, please send me a private message with your order information and we can go from there.