IC Hook with Pigtail

These are good quality IC test hooks with a male connection wire. Instead of a single hook, these have two hooks that are capable of grabbing very small points (like SOIC IC legs). Comes in a bag of five IC hooks of different colors (black, red, white, blue, and green). We use them with the Bus Pirate logic analyzer harnesses but are very cool on their own.

Wire length is 2.5" long. Male pin easily inserts into breadboard or other standard 0.1" connector.

IC Hook with Pigtail Product Help and Resources

Connector Basics

January 18, 2013

Connectors are a major source of confusion for people just beginning electronics. The number of different options, terms, and names of connectors can make selecting one, or finding the one you need, daunting. This article will help you get a jump on the world of connectors.

Comments

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  • bhunting / about 14 years ago / 3

    dave2, "description suggests only huge packages" is reasonably accurate. I'm sitting here with a package of these in my hand. I'd say they will be good for 0.1 headers, solderless breadboard work, passive lead clipping, standard dips, meaty connection points like that. I don't expect these would do well with fine pitch ICs. These are NOT micro-grabbers. At $5 for 5 don't expect them to be.

  • Member #336404 / about 11 years ago / 1

    These IC clips to pigtails are great for testing .. I have used for my breadboard to connect power and also to test my servos, the pigtail pins fit great into the servo plugs. Great stuff I will share it with my other friends who love this stuff as much as I do.

  • cmat / about 12 years ago / 1

    Quite useful for hooking up parts I want to test and not damage by soldering leads.

  • RoiLorelai / about 13 years ago / 1

    Lucky me... just saw the stock dry up ;)

  • dave2 / about 15 years ago / 1

    Any idea how fine these can tap single IC pins? Looking for something which can cope with at least 0.8mm pitch TQFP. Bonus points if it can live with 0.65mm SSOP or 0.5mm TQFP.
    SOIC in description suggests only huge packages.

    • Hmmm / about 11 years ago / 1

      They can grab a single SOIC pin, but the plastic head is so big you can only probe one at a time, not 2 adjacent ones.

Customer Reviews

3.8 out of 5

Based on 10 ratings:

Currently viewing all customer reviews.

4 of 4 found this helpful:

Too weak

The hooks are so weak that the tension in the pig tail end is enough to break them loose. If you hook them up and then move anything in any way, they will come off whatever they are hooked to. It is way too frustrating for me to have to gingerly connect them and then make sure I don't even bump the breadboard the pins are into for fear of having to reconnect everything again. I would rank them as one of the very few products I have been dissapointed with from Sparkfun.

2 of 2 found this helpful:

These do serve my purpose

These little IC Hooks are great for doing prototyping and hooking circuits on a breadboard to things I don't have headers on. They are a little cheaply made though. I'd like to see SparkFun come up with a better quality item. I'm ordering more for now to get me by. :o)

1 of 1 found this helpful:

Pricey but works

They do the job. Could be cheaper, but this isn't a bulk order kind of business.

1 of 1 found this helpful:

Makes it easy to monitor IC pins.

1 of 1 found this helpful:

Delicate clips but considering the size...

They work well for my needs. They are small, and thus delicate! Treat as such and they should work Okay until even smaller ones are required!

1 of 1 found this helpful:

Useful, but room for improvement

They will grab 16 - 24 AWG wire reliably, but if you use ~30 AWG you'll have to take some extra care. I think the target market here is 0.1" pins, and SOIC packages. It would be nice if Sparkfun carried something of better construction in the same format.

It's hard to complain very much because even pricey logic analyzers seem to skimp on these things. Soldering a pin/wire it's attached to will deform the tip. No cracking or splitting or gold flash wear problems after ~1yr of infrequent use. Sometimes re-situating the attached logic analyzer will pop them off, or put undue strain on the DUT. A highly flexible lead wire would fix this. Grabbing to release at an off angle is virtually impossible because the bumps aren't grippy enough. A design with 360deg features could solve this (think miniaturized oscope probe tip).

High Temperature Resistance: Poor Tip durability: Good Flexible lead wire: Okay Convenient release: Poor Contact reliability: Good Compatible wire gauge: Good (14-30AWG by my estimation) Color selection: Good

1 of 1 found this helpful:

The do what they're suppossed to do

Very clever IC hooks that work great for use with breadboards. The quality is not the best, but they work and have not come apart. The price was ok too. Very convenient, if I need more I will surely buy them again here.

Game changer

Having small electronics with tiny pcb holes means you need to solder wire/headers first. These allow you skip the soldering, just push the jaws through the hole. As some else pointed out, they are very teeny tiny and will pull through with just the spring tension, I so put a bit of wire/test lead in the jaws and they stay put. Now that I found out how useful they are, I need to buy more!

works perfectly

A+++