I’m making a breakout board for a PCB mount connector and have reached a conundrum. The pin assignments change depending on the configuration. Either each of the pins is paired together (1-2, 3-4, etc.) or the even numbers are bussed. (1, 3, 5 are signals and 2, 4, 6 are grounded).
It’s actually for a 16 pin connector so there would be eight solder bridges/shunts/jumpers, etc.
Does anyone have a better idea than solder bridge pads?
I’ve looked for a zero ohm SIP, but they’re pretty rare and probably a custom part from the minimum quantity that I saw when I did find one.
Use two rows of female machine pin headers and manually route the wire between them.
or
Use two headers and make different small plug in PCB daughter boards that connect everything together. So the plug in boards would just bridge everything together.
Never. The use is permanent once it’s assembled, so it won’t change at all.
I’m trying to only have to make one board for two uses with the same connector. I think the solder pad bridge would be the easiest. It’s not as “fancy” as jumpers, but it should work and be less work in the process (and cheaper to boot).
I’m still learning my way around Altium, but I think I have it figured out now.
I can’t quite figure out how to keep the soldermask from around the pads.
What would an easily bridgeable space with soldermask be? Right now, I have 50mil square pads with a 20mil gap between them. It’s all 24VDC or lower, so there shouldn’t be any arc potential.
That ought to work, right? (It’s odd to design something to create solder bridges for once.)
There are two different sets of unique connectors to get the signals off the board that breaks out the panel mount connector. If it’s to be an Input, then only the Input headers are attached. If it’s an output, then the Output header is attached and the grounds are bridged.
