Hi all! I am very new to hobby electronics (as you will soon see). I recently purchased an MPS430 prototype board (http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produ … ts_id=585) and want to connect some of the pins on the board to a breadboard and/or to another protoboard. What type of connectors do I need to do this? I’ve been told I should look at “Molex” connectors but their site was overwhelming to me… bonus points if you can give me a part number … thanks in advance!
Scott
You want standard 0.1 inch spacing connectors. If you measure the space between the same point on two adjacent pins on the header on that board you’ll find that it’s 0.1 inches (that is, every ten pins is an inch). This is the same spacing on any DIP chip and on breadboards, etc. You’ll want wires like http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … ts_id=8430 though you’ll need a ‘female’ connector on the side going to your MSP board and the ‘male’ connector on the end going into the breadboard. An alternative would be to get the female to female jumpers I pointed you to along with something like http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc … cts_id=116 that you can break into the size you need and reuse as many times as you want on the breadboard. Just connect one end to the MSP board and the other through one of the header pins I directed you to and stick that in the breadboard.
Excellent! Thanks a bunch!
Molex makes approximately a hundred bajillion kinds of connectors, but the ones people usually just call “Molex connectors” are the Molex KK series. Even that series covers a variety of pin sizes and spacings. All the other connector manufacturers also make connectors for those standard header pins, though— I usually use ones from AMP, no particular reason I guess.
A friend had mentioned molex connectors and I quickly got overwhelmed looking at the digi-key catalog, hence my post here… 