I recently wired up my Vader Service Droid, but I'm not happy with the resulting rats nest of jumper wires. The mess is partially due to the pre-fabed jumper wires. I'm stuck with jumpers that are tool long in a lot of cases and too short in others. I managed to cluge it all together using some header pins and with solid wire, but the result feels...less than optimum.
Has anyone had success in building their own F-F and M-F jumpers to custom lengths?
Beyond that I'm curious about methods people have used to reduce the rats nest syndrome when having to wire together multiple boards, sensors, servos, etc.
I thought of bundling or twisting some wire groups together that route to similar areas and/or using D-shell connectors to make 'production breaks' so that the stack of boards can be taken apart if needed without having to completely start over wire-by-wire to put it back together.
I also use DuPont connectors and a crimper to make my own wires.
Another good solution to the rats nest problem is using ribbon cables where possible. These work great for LCDs and sensors, but probably aren’t heavy enough to power larger servos. IDE cables from old computers is a good place to find them.
I have a love/hate relationship with these. I love how easy the are to work with and being able to make custom lengths and how you can buy different sizes (numbers of pins) but I HATE having to actually make the wires. the crimper I have will sometimes let the connectors shift before I crimp them and they get ruined, and it takes forever. making custom wiring can easily end up being the most time consuming part of a build for me.
recently I used a ribbon cable and cut the length I needed then managed to crimp male header pins to it. that seemed to work well. I also like getting a spool of 3 wire servo cable for making wires. I think the spool was $12usd on amazon and I have been using the same spool for 2+ years now…
Lots of good comments about the jumpers. Custom lengths would help, but maybe that’s not enough. What if jumpers could come with 90 degree ends? If you could lay the wires down it might be easier to bundle them, easier to access unused locations and stack boards that are jumpered. Ever seen pre-built jumpers like that? The plastic end holding the crimped wire would need to be molded with a 90 bend.
