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This is a good tutorial. Connectors are very tricky purchases; even if you do know exactly what you want, it's easy to buy the wrong version of a part, or forge

This is a good tutorial. Connectors are very tricky purchases; even if you do know exactly what you want, it's easy to buy the wrong version of a part, or forget to buy a necessary part of an assembly, or struggle to find the correctly-mating part that you know you need, or lack the crimping tool that goes with it, and so on. And they are expensive, so errors are costly. The difficulty, and cost, is why a lot of hobbyists (and even professionals) often stick to the same few connectors that they are familiar with. But sometimes you need to branch out; maybe you need something waterproof, or something which handles higher current, etc, and then you can spend hours looking through catalogs.

tinco 3y ago
Is there a connector/crimp tool set that's recommended for hobbyists? I make just a couple devices per year in a year where I'm actively pursuing the hobby. Mostly audio, some home automation and on the fence if I should dive a bit deeper into either synthesizers or robotics. Up to now I've only done screw terminals and soldered plugs. Spending even a couple hundred bucks on a single crimp tool seems like such a hurdle, especially as basically every tutorial or open source design I see seems to be using different connectors. edit: nvm, I just never did proper research. It seems like you can get a high quality crimping tool like the Engineer Pad-11 for just ~50 bucks and it does a bunch of common connectors like JST-SHD. I don't know why I thought I had to spend hundreds on single purpose tools.