Soldering iron
Makes everything fit and the cheap ones are orange.
El Reg BuzzFelch: 10 Electrical Connectors You CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT!
(Editorial note: We at The Register are continually exploring ways to deliver content in new and exciting formats. In response to the growing online trend for undemanding, text-light stuff with loads of big pictures, we're delighted to announce the launch of BuzzFelch - an automated aggregator which trawls the internet in search …
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Friday 31st January 2014 14:52 GMT Bobbo
Re: Soldering iron
Noooo! When you solder crimp connectors, the solder wicks up inside the wire. This causes the wire to become stiff and will fracture with flexing. Any connectors which use soldering will have better cable support.
Also, with the crimp terminals, use the ratcheting crimp tools-about 4x the cost of the cheap flat ones but they make joints that acutully last
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Friday 31st January 2014 16:28 GMT Fihart
Re: BS 546 @JDX
Decades ago most Japanese, US and a few British hifi amplifiers had US-style mains outlets on the rear for connecting turntable etc.
Used in the UK with nearly twice the mains voltage these were particularly lethal as you could touch the live pins as the plug was removed/inserted.
Did this once when still damp from a bath and, oddly, survived.
Noticed that on later models these sockets were sealed off and were eventually banished.
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Friday 31st January 2014 17:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: BS 546 @JDX
> Decades ago most Japanese, US and a few British hifi amplifiers had US-style mains outlets on the rear for connecting turntable etc.
Living here in Canada.
They still do this.
It is insane. So much metal chassis equipment being made *now* and no earth. @{DEITY} help these people join the 21st century, please!
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Friday 31st January 2014 20:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: BS 546
Here here! I`m surprised the EU haven`t mandated downgrading to unshutterred german shitztconnect or the worse safety of ground free things from all over Europe rather than adopt the best.
Like the fire extinguisher coding fiasco where now they are all red and people are put at risk. Oh and the 3-phase colour coding directive which has already claimed a number of lives
Arguably a shuttered version of the shrouded and shielded pin kettle style IEC would be a way to go but It would have to be bigger and right angled IMHO
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Sunday 2nd February 2014 17:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: BS 546
I forgot to say until now that I was on the BSi and industry committees for a number of years, and I much prefer Schuko plugs and sockets with individual circuit protection.
Because in the BS 1362 system, you can put a nail, in the plug and so negate any safety. The fuse can give a false sense of security, and at least one factory has burned down because of it.
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Friday 31st January 2014 07:07 GMT Denarius
actually ICAN
Have you guys been pestered by some semi-literate commentards lately ? Hang on, let me rephrase that. Have you been contacted by the products of the modern education system lately ? Bring on more teleportation workaround stories with some quantum mechanics. At least the comments can be fun. Also, the beginning of the year shutdown is ending. Should be some real news real soon now. Super X class flares, spooks admit they cant catch a cold, Windows 8 admitted to be a design mistake...oh, too late
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Friday 31st January 2014 07:39 GMT Cliff
Do you see much of the internet? This is a spoof of those linkbait sites that aggregate or simply screen scrape a bunch of images, surrounds them with adverts, forces you to click through one at a time, with titles that consistently involved hyperbole and a number '5 incredible photos of blah', 'your eyes won't believe x can be so exciting', '12 wired cancer treatments that really work!!'.
It's a pastiche of buzzfeed and ilk if it needs spelling out.
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Thursday 6th February 2014 21:25 GMT DiViDeD
Re: Learn something new every day
The Indian lashup reminded me of a trip to Koh Samui last year. Once you get out of the main tourist strip, the mains is all overhead cables, and the way you hook up your house is that two johnnies come along with cable, big crocodile clips and a LOT of wide insulating tape. Also thick gloves.
They wire to the house, carefully avoiding letting the cable hang too low by pulling it taut, then scurry up a ladder with their gloves on and jam the crocodile clips into the live overheads. Then it's just a matter of seeing how many rolls of insulating tape they can wrap around the junction.
Apparently this saves the inconvenience of switching off power to customers while splicing in new cables.
Yes, we did have a remarkable number of power cuts while we were there. Why do you ask?
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Friday 31st January 2014 08:58 GMT Alfie
Re: Connect me!
Even better, the strip and twist without even sellotape for insulation.
+1 for a pair of red and black RCA plugs as well, although I always liked the BNC with bayonet, always felt properly secured, until the 50Hz terminators failed and the whole backbone went down...
... tell that to kids these days, and they dont believe you!
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Friday 31st January 2014 15:13 GMT Toltec
Re: Connect me!
"I always liked the BNC with bayonet, always felt properly secured, until the 50Hz terminators failed and the whole backbone went down..."
You mean 50 ohm...
At least I resisted making a bad pun, I seem to do that with increasing frequency and it can impede the discussion.
Arrghh - now look what you made me do!
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:05 GMT Nigel 11
Strip and twist
Would you believe 100Mbit server networking down a stripped and twisted cable? (and does it work with newfangled Gbit? I've never tried).
Well, what would you do at 4am, when you discover that you have to connect the server to a switch 13m away from the rack and you have only 10m cables and shorter?
It was working the next morning and the strip-twisted cable assembly was swapped as soon as possible the next day.
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:32 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Re: Connect me!
BNC was all very well, but severely flawed in a rack environment imho.
The lack of distinguishing colour from the the multitude of cable-tied AC power cords instigated one of the more challenging 'noisy' line problems I ever investigated*
*Closely followed by the daily 11am** disconnection of the p2p microwave link between two offices (because the council wouldn't let them dig up the small park in between the two buildings to lay some cable).
**+/- 10 mins
An upvote to the commentard who can work out the riddle of the last one.
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Friday 31st January 2014 12:19 GMT Vulch
Re: Connect me!
"An upvote to the commentard who can work out the riddle of the last one"
Probably related to the occasion at an ITV station where I was employed when the emergency standby generator fired up and cut in around 3pm due to loss of external power, then promptly shut down due to excessive load taking the region off the air.
Later that afternoon a missive went round suggesting it would be detrimental to peoples career prospects if kettles were ever found plugged in to the technical mains again...
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Friday 31st January 2014 13:10 GMT Sir Runcible Spoon
Re: 11:00am disconnection
I'm heading off early today so I'll tell you..
Every morning around 11am a street cleaner (you know the ones with those kerb brushes etc. that used to drive around places) turned up at the park.
It would scare the massive flock of pidgeons that nested in the trees and they would fly up through the microwave beam. So the hoover and tornado guess was oddly close :)
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Friday 31st January 2014 12:43 GMT Fihart
Re: Connect me! @Big_Boomer
DIN plugs, spawn of the Devil or Deutschland. Recent acquisition of an aged Quad 405 amp/preamp transported me back to the bad old days of soldering my fingers and trying to plug the bloody things in blind round the back of units and them always being the wrong way up (or the wrong number of pins). And then later falling out.
Only SCART sockets (thanks France) come close.
Have you continentals never heard of phono plugs ? They just work.
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Friday 31st January 2014 15:22 GMT Kubla Cant
Re: Connect me! @Big_Boomer
DIN plugs...falling out
I once fitted some audio equipment with incredibly sexy DIN plugs that had a screw-down (or possibly bayonet) collar that would prevent them falling out.
SCART connectors, on the other hand, were designed specifically for falling-out. I didn't know they were French, but it doesn't surprise me.
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Saturday 1st February 2014 00:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Connect me! @Big_Boomer
there were 2 different flavours of locking for 5pin dins, the threaded are tuchel connectors, used on microphones on portable reel to reels by UHER i think maybe even Nagra (?) and the bayonet ones are a din pin version of the us ham tranceiver plug range with same style locking ring. what the generic name is/was escapes me.
both were compatible with a plain din socket as I remember.
As for peritel/scart Merde! non constant impedence also, non standard impedence for video, Hmmm, Niiiice ;{
I am reliably informed by an ex BBC colleague old enough to remember firsthand it was a french measure to stop Japanese flooding the french market as every TV had to have one to be sold. 6months and the Japanese tv`s had one of these substandard things, good thinking monsieur? NOT.
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm amazed they ever have any electricity.
I'm amazed they ever have any electricity.
Unlikely that there are any electricity cables there. It is probably all stuff like cable TV.
Electricity (3-phase) is carried by the bare cables that run five-year-old's-arm's length from balconies on which five-year-olds play.
I'm amazed we have any six-year-olds.
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Friday 31st January 2014 12:18 GMT Peter Simpson 1
Re: #3 - terminal blocks
I prefer the pluggable ones (but they only work for PCBs). Don't need to unscrew each wire when the PCB needs replacing (or repair or whatever).
Oh, and +1 for the "Mumbai Multiway" -- I shall be using that from here on, in place of "rat's nest", when referring to spaghetti wiring.
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:11 GMT Nigel 11
Re: #3 - terminal blocks
I raise you a well-cooked mouse that had inserted its head into the fan on an (old, hot) Opteron server.
I never could convince myself that there was any hole in the chassis large enough for that mouse to squeeze through. I do hope that the poor wee squeaker's neck was broken by the fan, otherwise it was a horrible death.
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Sunday 2nd February 2014 21:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: #3 - terminal blocks
"Chock Blocks" are specifically different (so I learned last year after 25 years of getting it "wrong", or just using a different local name).
I think the "Chock Block" has to come with a box to hold the terminals in. I may be wrong though, but that's how the chaps differentiated the two.
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Friday 31st January 2014 17:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not just an angry American
Got a house full of these things. Local building inspector INSISTED on having the hole down or he wouldn't issue the Certificate of Occupancy. The vast majority of these things are installed hole down although I have seen a few installed hole up. Why? No reason other than "we've always done it that way."
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:04 GMT Peter Simpson 1
Re: Not just an angry American
USAian here. "Ground down" has been the standard, ever since those things were introduced (I know, I was there).
A few years ago, some bright light got the idea that they should be installed "ground up". This was post 1993, when my house was built, but I can't nail it down any more precisely than that.
The word-of-mouth reasoning for "ground up" is that a wire, metal cover plate, or other conductor, falling across a partially unplugged connector, would contact the ground first, instead of falling across the two line terminals, as it might, if the outlet had been installed "ground down".
This seems to me to be a low probability occurrence (to say the least) and the National Electrical Code agrees with me as it doesn't state a preferred orientation (and shows outlets "ground down").
So "down" is "normal", unless you're paraoid, then "up" is OK. It seems to be an individual preference or the preference of an overly controlling local electrical inspector.
A secondary reason is that some electricians mount outlets controlled by wall switches in "ground up" configuration to distinguish them from unswitched outlets. This seems to be an uncommonly sensible idea.
// yeah, I know, way TMI...have a nice weekend!
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Friday 31st January 2014 20:25 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Not just an angry American
"The word-of-mouth reasoning for "ground up" is that a wire, metal cover plate, or other conductor, falling across a partially unplugged connector, would contact the ground first, instead of falling across the two line terminals, as it might, if the outlet had been installed "ground down"."
The original reason for being "ground down" is the same as why Australia/NZ require it - it means that should the plug be pulled out by the weight of the cable, the earth pin is the last one to be disconnected. (AU plugs were originally "ground-up" to protect against anything falling on the plug, but a couple of electrocutions in the 1930s due to partially-pulled-out plugs changed everyone's mind.)
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Friday 31st January 2014 20:40 GMT Eddy Ito
Re: Not just an angry American
Ah that explains it, thanks. I had asked the inspector when doing an addition a few years back why the new town buildings all had ground up and he replied it was part of the State code for commercial buildings so I guess it's some local requirements in addition to the NEC. He also mentioned that while I passed at the time, I would have failed had I waited for the new codes to come into place. It seems the new code requires AFCI breakers to be installed in all panel circuits with a few exceptions and as I understand it those are mostly where one would normally use GFCI breakers.
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Friday 31st January 2014 13:14 GMT Mage
Re: F-connectors and Phono AKA RCA
Both are American, Late 1940s early 1950 (F) and late 1930s (RCA coax).
Old UK TV connectors are "Belling Lee" (actually the original maker and not a real part name), of indeterminate RF impedance and designed for AM radio aerials in 1930s! The USA I think has used F-connectors for a long time for coax when not using 300 Ohm Ribbon.
A Phonograph uses cylinders and Gramophone uses disks. But USAians call a Gramophone a Phonograph, even though Gramophone was first called that in USA (Emile Berliner, Victor Talking Machine Co, who founded Japan's JVC and UK's HMV, Victor was taken over by RCA to become RCA Victor. This is why RCA, JVC (only in Japan as Victor) and HMV all have the "horn" and Nipper dog logo)
Abbreviated as P.U. (Pickup), Gram or Phono on the Radio. In the 1920s they first released Pickup adaptors for windup acoustic Gramophones, in 1930s standalone electric players for the Radio. Originally US used 2 x 1/8" wander plugs like UK did till 1960s. but in late 1930s or early 1940s RCA introduced the coax plug, which as it was most used in USA and for Gramophone plugged into a Radio, or for internal connections on a Radiogram.
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:17 GMT Nigel 11
Re: F---ing SCSI connectors
And for proper wake-in-the-night-sweating nightmares: SCSI
You're obviously too young to remember the connector on a Digital Massbus(TM) disk cable. SCSI was a sweet dream by comparison.
The aforesaid cable was about 40mm in diameter. I think one of them once featured in a Star Trek episode, strangling a crewman by telekinesis.
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Friday 31st January 2014 09:51 GMT Blacklight
Terminal blocks?
Nah, Wago connectors :)
Whilst refurbing, I wanted to kit out the house with some Hue bulbs, and needed to replace the light fittings as (at the time) only ES27 Hue bulbs were available. Terminal/chocolate blocks were mahoosive given the flush(er) fittings I wanted, and then I stumbled across Wago connectors - push fit and lever/clamp - and they're really tiny.
No more trying to hold a fitting *and* chocolate block *and* wires in one hand whilst trying to tighten a fiddly tiny bl**dy screw with the other for me :)
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Friday 31st January 2014 10:09 GMT monkeyfish
Re: Terminal blocks?
I hate to break it to you, but that there is a 'terminal block with lever', wago are just one of the many brands to make them, and wago themselves make lots of other connectors themselves. Though there cage-clamp ones are great for vibration tables, still have to hold the wire and the connector and push down on the spring with a screwdriver while making sure the whole thing doesn't ping across the room. Unless you fix it securely first of course, but that would make you a looser. Check this out for lots of sexy connector goodness.
http://uk.farnell.com/jsp/search/results.jsp?N=203145&Ntk=gensearch&Ntt=orange&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&displaytext=&hasOnlySelectedPGRefinement=false&_requestid=276456&getResults=true
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Friday 31st January 2014 10:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Similar in the Philippines
The wiring mess you've shown at the end of the articles is a very similar sight in the Philippines.
Every ISP/Telephone provider have their own install crew who run cables down the street, to properties etc. There doesn't seem to be any regulation and old wire doesn't get removed.
I live in a small compound with about 30 houses and we have similar wiring inside our compound, because each time someone changes provider, a new line is ran and the old one is left just sitting there taking up space.
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Friday 31st January 2014 10:48 GMT f1rest0rm
Consider my world rocked ...
That was a happy few minutes of not working :-)
And reading the comments has taken more time.
And now I need to make up my own "What about kettle leads FFS" post - with youtube links etc
This could get me through to lunchtime ... Thank you El Reg for making Friday morning bearable.
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:01 GMT Tompkinson
The award for the worst connector ever goes to...
The UHF TV connector aka Belling-Lee IEC-169-2. Still in use 90 years later on the back of all digital tellies at frequencies approaching 1GHz when it was only ever meant to carry the BBC's medium wave stuff. Truly disgusting, but nobody dares get rid of it.
Tellies also seem to have a monopoly in sh*t connectors cos the SCART runs it a very close second.
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
How many people would know what BNC connectors are for today?
And how many use them on a regular basis? RG-58 coax feeds I once used to hammer Ethernet frames down (at the blistering speed of 8Mbps) now cough up 100W PEP of RF to my antennas. A lot of my equipment uses SO-239, N-type and SMA connectors, but my standard RF connector of choice these days is the humble BNC as its cheap, good to 2.7GHz, easy to terminate, quick-connect and durable. Paul Neill and Carl Concelman knew what they were doing when they invented it.
DIN5 I see is notable by its absence, both in that it was used for MIDI, but also for the original PC keyboard port. They're a cheap and reasonably rugged connector in my experience.
IEC power is another notable omission. Show me a standard XT, AT or ATX desktop or server power supply without one.
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Friday 31st January 2014 13:26 GMT Mage
Re: How many people would know what BNC connectors are for today?
Yes. And while BNC is 50 Ohms the BBC as well as MUSA used the mysterious 75 Ohm BNC (or cheated). Cable TV trunk use the rarer 75 Ohm N-Connector (regular ones are 50),
BNC are also often used for SDI (?) etc, carrying MPEG data either as a single stream or in MPEG-2 Multiplexed format (not same spec as MPEG-2 Codec as it can have MPEG4 or indeed nearly any kind of data).
Then there is a 50 Ohm connector very like an F-connector (often used on on GSM / 3G client aerials) but with a pin rather than centre of coax.
SCSI Yes I have large collection of those. I'm not sure how many flavours of SCSI exist never mind the connectors which have oddly included DB25 also used for "Centronics" Parallel (bad IBM!) and RS232 Serial.
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:13 GMT Peter Simpson 1
As an older electrical engineer, I was once told by a very attractive summer female intern at our company, that she could never remember which connector was the male, and which was the female.
I somehow managed to explain it to her while keeping the conversation on a professional level, but I can't for the life of me remember how I did it!
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:44 GMT Pahhh
Connector Fetish
Its very very wrong to get excited about connectors but after years of suffering the inadequacy of SCSI cables (pretty much all them, from the Centronics that just fall out as soon as you turn your back to the newer ones where the pins get bent), I was quite excited (yes, that sad) by the External SAS connectors.
Specifically the SFF-8088 . Its easy to distinguish which up it goes in, its a very firm fit and then it solidly clicks into place.
I agree with some of the posters on the worse connectors. The TV Arial connector is up there but not as bad as the SCART. But for me, the SCSI Centronics connectors (like the large version of the printer connector) takes the award.
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Friday 31st January 2014 12:09 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Connector Fetish
You're one of the people who removed the wire clips from the Centronics-type SCSI-1 connectors (they weren't Centronics connectors, that was for parallel printers), aren't you?
With those buggers clipped in, it was often impossible to get the cables out, especially if there was no space on either side of the plug to unclip them!
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Friday 31st January 2014 14:56 GMT Pahhh
Re: Connector Fetish
"You're one of the people who removed the wire clips from the Centronics-type SCSI-1 connectors "
Nope, they just used to fall off after being squeezed a few times. Plus sometimes the female connector didnt have the clips as the socket was in a recess which meant there would be no way to access the clips.
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:53 GMT John Sturdy
Anderson connectors
Nice big genderless DC power connectors; the middle-size ones I use are rated at "a very high current for ten seconds, or 175 amps continuous". They seem to have dropped the 700A version, which had up to 10 data connectors in the middle; I would have called that "data + power, done properly" but it was almost the size of a netbook, which unfortunately probably ruled it out as a contender for a new variant of USB.
Available in lots of colours, too, with slightly incompatible geometries, for different voltages, although everyone seems to ignore the manufacturer's suggested colour coding scheme.
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:27 GMT Nigel 11
Re: Anderson connectors
Along those lines, does the 1000-amp-plus 12V car battery connector have a name? The modern one that goes around the post and tightens with a wrench? (It works). Or the ancient Lucas twelve-clawed one that was supposed to push on and tighten with a thumbwheel on top, which would corrode itself into an unfortunate combination of immovability and high resistance within a year of fitting a new battery?
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Friday 31st January 2014 11:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
What about the legend that is IEEE-488 (GPIB)?
That was a man's connector alright. Each one must have weighed 50 or 60 pounds and the connecting cable could have been used to hold up suspension bridges.
You couldn't have one of those on a modern namby-pamby instrument, oh no. You had to build a proper big heavy bastard with transformers and a chunky steel chassis, just to survive the strain from the connections.
All this and you had to measure the data transfer rate with a calendar. Those were the days
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Friday 31st January 2014 15:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Showing my age ..
"Does anyone still remember Data Circuit Equipment and Data Terminal Equiment ?"
Sure do Jimmy. You had to figure out whether it was using DSR / DTR or RTS / CTS handshaking, or software handshake with XON / XOFF, Then match up the baud rate. Then how many bits and stop bits. And then the parity. Signal ground and protective ground.
It's a wonder we ever got anything working at all. Young people with their USB cables, don't know they're born.
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Friday 31st January 2014 16:58 GMT Boothy
Ah yes, I remember when the company I worked for (long since defunct) decided to experiment with switching from screw terminal junction boxes, to Krone ones.
Typically we'd be using these to hook up multiple 2, 4 or 6 pair cables, into a single 20 or 40 pair cable.
Some of these could take half a day or longer to complete one junction box.
With the Krone version, we could do the same number of cables in about 20-30 minutes.
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Friday 31st January 2014 17:14 GMT Boothy
Re: Molex Power Connector
All? In older PCs yes, but not current ones.
HDs and Optical drives switched to SATA data/power connectors years ago, decent case fans and coolers normally use motherboard headers (so the voltage can be controlled). High end GFX cards which used to use them for extra power, switched to the 4-PIN 12V CPU type connectors many years ago.
I can't think of anything else, other than legacy items, that might use these in a current PC? Only exception I can think of are the cheaper case fans, that normally run at a fixed speed, but those are rare now (in my experience).
But I also agree, most definitely a cheap, horrid connector.
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Friday 31st January 2014 16:58 GMT aregross
Don't forget the original IBM Token Ring connector! Made a bunch of those cables when they first came out as buying them ready-made from IBM required taking out a loan. The original IBM Type-1 cable spec also included a fibre optic cable inside the sheathing along with the 4 copper wires (if you bought the cable from IBM).
http://www.cablingsys.com/images/204_08.jpg
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Friday 31st January 2014 18:22 GMT Nigel 11
The ultimate evil connector....
No-one has yet mentioned the ultimate in evil connectors, which is not only current but hell-bent on conquering the EU housing market.
GU10 lightbulb connector.
For which you need a plastic suction cup to manipulate the bulb into place, or risk having glass splinters embedded in your fingertips.
AAAAARGH!
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Friday 31st January 2014 22:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Real crimp connectors
The picture just shows the weedy little crimps used in car accessories and the like. For real hot connectors you need serious crimps. The biggest I've used were 95 sq mm cross section (someone will perhaps beat this by a big margin) and were carrying 750A peak. The crimp tool weighs over 20kg. The bolted joint to the busbar has to be made rather carefully with clean metal to metal surfaces and with Belleville washers under the nut so that pressure is guaranteed to be maintained. Otherwise, after a bit of vibration, you can get a truly hot connection - arcs, zinc oxide vapour, fused copper.
I am surprised no "audiophiles" have suggested using 95sq mm cable for making loudspeaker connections, the electrons wouldn't have the slightest risk of all bunching up at a narrow bit and so making the sound tinny (to the perfect ears of the audiophile).
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Saturday 1st February 2014 02:44 GMT Herby
Fahnestock connections??
Look, nothing would be complete without them. Probably pre-date many of the connections mentioned in the comments.
As for crimp connections, PLEASE note that the color of the plastic sleeve is NOT to be used for color coding, it is to determine the wire size to be used. They typically had ranges: Red-small, Blue-intermediate, Yellow-large.
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahnestock_clip
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Thursday 6th February 2014 23:07 GMT DiViDeD
El Reg a TABLOID?
Sorry, but that is a vicious calumny. I believe The Reg (or 'that old rag' as my SO calls it) has always prided itself as being a prime example of the new breed of gutter press, since I understand that's where most of their hacks end up sleeping after their Friday night drinkies.
Red Top and proud of it say I!
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Sunday 2nd February 2014 20:44 GMT Donald Becker
I vote for the article to be "The top 10 linkbait 'Top 10' stories you'll read this year"
I do think they missed the Edison base lamp connector, and the RJ series telephony connectors. The Edison base lamp (screw-in) is cheap and sturdy. It requires only low-tech stamped brass or tin-plate sheets, and has a huge contact and support area.
The RJ (e.g. 6p4c and the like) connectors require much higher tech manufacturing, but are cheap, small, light and have remarkably good electrical characteristics. They regularly survive decades exposed to the elements in phone use, and putting Gb Ethernet through a connector designed around audio frequencies is mind blowing. The competing communications connectors cost 20x to 100x as much.
As far as line power plugs, we would all design something different today. But put yourself in the place of early practitioners. You needed to design a connector that could be made in a few seconds with sheet metal and hand tooling. Flat contacts formed of folded-over sheet brass definitely wins over round pins. Rigid round pins require far more precision in all dimensions, take much longer to make, and often results in inferior contact area.
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Monday 3rd February 2014 09:53 GMT CaveatVenditor
In the beginning was the wander plug
All these shiny new plugs are freaking me out. We only use tag strips, wander plugs or banana plugs here. Somebody told me we should get rid of all our 5A and 15A mains plugs, but we'll wait until the last one makes that funny burning fish smell.
BTW there was a rumour that mains voltage might be raised from the current 200 volts to 240. Can anyone confirm when this might happen?
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Monday 3rd February 2014 12:59 GMT Anonymous Coward
PP9 rulz!
My favourite power outlet connector is (are) the funky press-stud connections on a 9V battery, be it PP9 or it's li'l brother PP3. Coupled with the favoured and calibrated method of determining available charge... licking said terminals to see how tangy they are.
Other contenders:
Twisted together wires (probably covered by the Mumbai multiway tho).
Aluminium foil wrapped around a lolly-stick mating with a brass drawing-pin.
and of course, anything conductive / semi-conductive plus blu-tack.
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Thursday 6th February 2014 23:03 GMT DiViDeD
Well, if 3.5mm jacks should be on there, surely we have to include the 6mm jack?
And after several hundred comments, I'm appalled, yes appalled that nobody has yet spoken up for the humble GPO A jack plug.
I cut my teeth on these little beauties using patch bays in mahogany cabinets, courtesy of the BBC - 3 distinct modes of operation on the same jack - unplugged means a closed (or sometimes open, but usually closed) circuit, linking studio signal to the desk, full push in to break the circuit and direct it elsewhere, partial to 'listen in', allowing you to patch a studio output to another channel without disturbing the original feed.
And they were BRITISH dammit!
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
