Pin header
A pin header ( engl. Pin header ) is a connector with a plurality of serially arranged pin contacts formed on circuit boards in the electronics is used. Its purpose is to establish a connection with many contacts from one circuit board to another or to peripheral assemblies , usually with the help of ribbon cables and post connectors or a socket strip.
Designs
Pin headers are often provided with a rectangular plastic border , the insulating body. This design is also called a post bar , post plug or box plug . The border, together with a coding , prevents the socket from being accidentally inserted incorrectly (shifted or twisted). If the pins are not round or square, but flattened, one also speaks of a knife strip .
In order to stack boards, there are so-called board stackers, also known as stacking strips or sandwich pin strips. They have two insulators and can be soldered to the board at both ends. This is a non-detachable circuit board connection.
Pin headers are available with a pitch of 1.00 to 5.08 mm, in other designs also with a pitch of 0.3 to 0.8 mm. The most common design is the double-row post bar with 2.54 mm ( 1 ⁄ 10 inch = 100 mil ). They are available in almost all pole numbers from 2-pole to over 64-pole, straight or angled, in surface mounting technology or through hole technology , in the designs with or without trough, with additional locking, with different pin lengths as well as round (turned) or angular (mostly square) pins. This design is specified in DIN EN 60603-13 (replacing DIN 41651-1 and -2).
Female header
The counterpart to the pin header is the socket header, which contains the spring contacts that match the pin header . Like the post bar, it has solder contacts for assembly on a circuit board and can be plugged directly onto a post bar. This combination creates a multi-pole connection, if z. B. signal lines are to be connected from a motherboard to a plug-in board. The combination of pin and socket strips is a detachable connection.
Another counterpart that has no solder contacts is the IDC socket (Insulation Displacement Connector). It is firmly connected to a ribbon cable via insulation displacement connectors, which can be plugged onto the pin header in this way.
To simplify and to protect against confusion of the terms , the pin header is often referred to as a male and the socket header as a female in practice.
use
Almost every printed circuit board uses pin headers or socket headers as connectors when several lines or bus systems have to be routed to the outside.
In almost all PCs pin connectors are on the motherboard ( mainboard used) to USB - and FireWire to connect jacks, housing buttons and status LEDs with ribbon cable. In the past, floppy disk drives , hard disks , serial , parallel or SCSI connections were also connected to the motherboard via pin headers.
Pin headers are often used as a patch panel for jumpers . In this way, the conductor routing can be easily adapted to different configurations.
Since the pins and contact springs have a gold or tin coating, when choosing the pin and socket headers you should consider how often you want to insert the parts (mating cycles). If it is switched more frequently, a thicker gold coating is recommended in order to ensure long-term contact. Standard gold plating thicknesses are flash gold , 0.25 µm (0.01 mil) and 0.75 µm (0.03 mil).
