Pin header

A pin header (german pin header) is a connector having a plurality of pin contacts arranged in a row, which is used on printed circuit boards in the electronics. Its purpose is to establish a connection with many contacts of a circuit board to another or to the peripheral modules, usually with the aid of ribbon cables and post connectors or a connector strip.

Designs

Headers are often provided within a rectangular box made ​​of plastic, the insulating body. One calls this design also pin header, pin header or box header. The border prevents accidental plugging in the wrong pin position. She has for two-tier design, also an encoding that only in the correct position allows the plugging in the matching pole connector ( hiding Protection / Keyhole ). If the pins are not running round or square, but flattened, one also speaks of a male connector.

To stack boards, there are so-called platinum truck or sandwich headers. You have two insulator and can be soldered at both ends of the board. This is a permanent board connectors.

Headers are available in increments from 1.00 to 5.08 mm and comes in other designs also in the grid from 0.3 to 0.8 mm. The design most commonly used is the double row pin header with 2.54 mm (1/ 10 "). They are available in almost all pole numbers of 2 -pin to 64 - pin, straight or angled, in Surface Mounting Technology or Through Hole Technology, in the designs with or without bath, with additional locking device, with different pin lengths and round ( twisted ) or rectangular (usually square ) pins.

Receptacle

The counterpart of the male connector is the female connector, which contains the matching the male connector spring contacts. It has to be just like the post bar solder for mounting on a circuit board, and can be plugged directly into a header row. This combination produces a multi-pole connection if, for example: signal cables are to be connected by a backplane to a daughterboard. The combination of pin and socket connector is a detachable connection.

Another counterpart but has no solder, the IDC connector ( Insulation Displacement Connector). It is connected via insulation displacement connectors firmly with a flat ribbon cable that can be plugged in this way to the pin strip.

To simplify and to protect against confusion about the pin strip is often referred to as male and the female connector than females in practice.

Use

Almost every PCB pin headers or receptacles used as connectors when multiple lines or bus must be routed to the outside.

In almost all PCs pin headers on the motherboard ( mainboard ) can be used to connect USB and FireWire connectors, housings button and status LEDs with ribbon cable. Formerly known floppy disk drive, hard drive, serial, parallel, or SCSI connector were connected via pin headers with the motherboard.

Headers are often used as a plug for field jumper, making it easily possible to change the interconnect routing for different configurations.

Since the pins and contact springs have a gold or tin plating, one should consider when choosing the male and female connector strips, how many times you want to put the parts ( mating cycles ). In case of frequent Insert a thicker gold coating is recommended in order to safeguard the longterm contact. Standard thicknesses of gold pads are flash gold, 0.25 microns ( 10 μ " ) and 0.75 microns ( 30 μ ").