Making Cables – Part 1

A while ago, I tried to find out the best way to make up my own connector cables with my budget in mind.

My needs, at the time, were to make some 1 pin and 2 pin connectors using DuPont male and female connectors. These were to make up some 9V battery power lines, and later making up some USB power lines.

I found some useful information on the Internet, but the part that was a little mysterious was making DuPont male connectors.

There are a couple of things that you need that will make your life a lot easier if you’re going to do this. First and foremost, you’re going to need a decent pair cable crimping pliers.

I’m going to make up three leads.

1. 9V Battery Snap to 2 Pin Female DuPont;
2. 2 Pin DuPont Male to 2 x 2 Pin DuPont Female (split) Lead; and
3. Dead Mouse USB cable to 2 Pin Female DuPont (5.1V).

I’ll treat each of these as separate projects so that you can refer to them more quickly if you need to.

I’ll litter the Internet with photos of each of the steps so that you can follow the projects as easily as possible.

Stuff that I recommend that you have for these projects:

• Scalpel – used for tidying up the wire insulation so that it fits nicely into the pin housing;
• 8 x 2 pin DuPont housing;
• 6 x DuPont Female connectors;
• 2 x DuPont Male connectors;
• DuPont crimp pliers;
• Solder;
• Soldering Iron;
• Red and Black (or whatever combination) jumper wire;
• Shrinky wire insulation;
• Wire Strippers;
• Wire Cutters.

You can usually buy a couple of hundred male, female and 2 pin housings on eBay for a couple of dollars.

Each project only takes a couple of minutes to complete, so you can get a good result pretty quickly and end up with some versatile jumpers and connectors for your projects for a little effort.

So far, I’ve made these up for Arduino projects, simple power connections for solderless breadboard projects, power connectors and links for PCB projects.

I’m going to start the first project tonight, so I’ll post part 2 of this article after I’m done. As I said, I’ll take plenty of photos as I go.