If you tinker, you find yourself needing to make firm but reversible connections. \u00a0The standard solution is based on a male-female connectors system, and the only tool you need to make such connection is a set of crimping pliers.<\/p>\n
These connector systems are based on the principle of a mechanical connection: the bare wire is literally crushed between small overlapping pieces of metal. The friction between the bare-wire and overlapping metal creates a sound electrical connection as well. \u00a0Creating a proper “crimp” allows the connection to be made and unmade hundreds of times without failure. Moreover, once you become good at crimping, it will take literally 15 seconds to make a connection—in comparison, a solder gun requires 1 minute just to warm up.<\/p>\n
There are a variety of crimp standards, but for POWER connections, I find the JST-style connectors are the best because they are keyed so that the connectors \u00a0cannot be accidentally joined in the wrong way. To make such connections, I must admit that I love the following set of PA-09 crimping pliers<\/a>, shown here<\/a>, from a Japanese company that names itself Engineer, Inc.<\/p>\n I own another set of crimpers, the SN-28B, shown here.<\/a>\u00a0Although these were slightly cheaper, and even though they tout the ability to perform both crimps at the same time, I prefer the ergonomics of the PA-09. Moreover, because they are designed to perform two crimps at once, the spacing between the first and second crimp forms is too big to handle the JST-style connectors.<\/p>\n The PA-09 can also crimp the very popular .1″ header pins that are used on Arduino boards, etc. Again, the pliers require two crimps. You can see a full list of the types of connectors that the PA-09 can handle. In the US, I purchased mine from the previously reviewed Sparkfun<\/a>.<\/p>\n In summary: the tool has perfect ergonomics, the material on the grip and the steap is high quality and a pleasure to use, and because it was designed to do one crimp at a time, it is extremely flexible and precise.<\/p>\n Ergonomic crimpers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[1449],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7254"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7254"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34589,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7254\/revisions\/34589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tkdev.kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}