How is everyone powering the Arduino Pro 328 5V? The 6Ah lithium ion is quite attractive but the conversion to 5V is going to leave me with a mess of wiring. The battery has the JST connector but the step-up boards don’t have that. I could make another little board to adapt the JST lead to plain wires but that’s so messy. Is there a better way?
chris snell,
What have you done to try to solve this problem?
A quick search of the SparkFun products for “JST” produced:
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9749
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8612
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8670
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/8671
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9914
among others. What I didn’t find, though was a JST male connector intended to be put on a cable, rather than a board.
As you didn’t say to what step-up board you are trying to connect, it’s hard to be of detailed help.
If your concern is the difference between the 2 mm spacing on a JST connector and the 0.1" (= 2.54 mm) spacing on [this board, I point out that the bigger problem is that they laid out the board with the output connection between the input connections. (If they had put the GND in the middle, you probably could have made use of the hole size to cover most of the 0.54 mm difference and put the standard JST board connector on the step-up board, perhaps with a little “adjusting”.) As they provided only one GND connector and it’s not in the middle, though, you’ll need to do a bit of kluging. You could, for example, wire wrap a short piece of wire to each of the pins on a mating JST connector, then cover them with heat-shrink tubing, and solder those wires (along with an output pair for the Arduino) to the step-up board.
I will point out, though, that if your only problem is that you have a connector that you would rather not have on a battery pack cable, wire cutters may be the easy path to solution. Just remember to cut the leads one at a time, so you don’t short your LiPo with the cutters. You also need to keep the bare ends from shorting to each other as you assemble. If you intend to use the same connection for charging, then I suggest you splice in a pair of un-terminated wires, rather than removing the connector.