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Male/female pin converter?

madbilly

Hi everyone,

First, this is my first post in element14 so I don't know if there is a better subforum for my question - if there is, then mods please move it there.

 

I'm trying to find some pin converters, by which I mean something which will change a male pin into a female socket. This is primarily for stacking shield boards on top of a microcontroller board when I've got the wrong sense pins soldered in and don't want to change them. For example, I have two boards which I want to stack, both have male pins, so how do I connect them? I've looked around a lot of sites trying to find these but haven't succeeded yet and when I was thinking of where I could ask element14 seemed like the logical choice.

 

Helpful suggestions much appreciated.

Cheers image

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  • Hello,

     

    I agree with others, maybe if you need an adapter for these kind of situations, pay good attention to the orientation, as usually parts that are stackable use stackable-female headers and most of the time are placed in the same orientation. Here are a few options to consider:

    • Change your shield boards to use stackable female headers, these are mainly used for your intended purpose, when used on a PCB they look like these
      image
    • For female-to-female connections use break-away headers
      image
    • For male-to-male connections SMD approach: I think you can make your own PCB and use SMD female headers on both sides connected with vias, like a type of sandwich, this way you can decide how many pins you need and by using SMD female headers, they can be perfectly aligned one on top of each other.
      image
    • For male-to-male connections, If you don't want to fiddle with SMD, well you can make your own PCB with two edges like in the picture below and solder two female headers on each side. The downside of this approach is that the spacing between the shields will be huge
      imageimage
    • Poor's man male-to-male connection, well the last resort is to use a piece of solderable PCB protoboard and offsett to female headers each on different side of the PCB. The downside of this one is that will offset your shields.

      OR
      use two right angle headers with the same PCB  (clip the terminals so don't interfere and solder only on one side), this approach will offset your shields but can greatly reduce the spacing between them
      imageimageimage

    Luis

  • in reply to luislabmo

    These are quite hard to find : ) I've wanted to get some for ages, but never found the magic search term! I thought they may be for wire-wrap, but not seen them on Farnell/Newark site. I had a couple of 40-way lengths of these but used it up over the past few years : (

    Sometimes I'll use the smaller ones and try to push the plastic portion into the center.

    image

  • in reply to shabaz

    I tried few times and yes they are really hard to find with a good price (also the colored ones). I do get them from Pololu, Adafruit, Sparkfun, etc which usually get these kind specific parts from not so popular manufacturers but the thing with these providers is that they do their QC homework and do sell quality parts, so they have good coatings, LEDs will be all the same brightness, leads won't rust over time, etc.

    Try "double sided male headers", "equal length pin header" or "extra-long ping header" I found many results with these terms and maybe few of those will be based in the UK.


    Luis

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