- Home
- Product Categories
- Headers
- Break Away Female Headers - Swiss Machine Pin
Break Away Female Headers - Swiss Machine Pin
Single row of 30-holes, female header with swiss round machined pins. These units have very high quality round pins to accept and retain machine pin headers much better. Can be cut to size with a pair of wire-cutters. Standard .1" spacing. We use them extensively in the Olimex development boards. They mate very well with male break away Swiss Machine Pin headers or themselves.
- Receptacle Style: Machine (Round)
- Number of Pins: 30
- Pin Spacing: 0.1" (2.54 mm)
- Receptacle Depth: 3 mm
Break Away Female Headers - Swiss Machine Pin Product Help and Resources
Core Skill: Soldering
This skill defines how difficult the soldering is on a particular product. It might be a couple simple solder joints, or require special reflow tools.
Skill Level: Noob - Some basic soldering is required, but it is limited to a just a few pins, basic through-hole soldering, and couple (if any) polarized components. A basic soldering iron is all you should need.
See all skill levels
Comments
Looking for answers to technical questions?
We welcome your comments and suggestions below. However, if you are looking for solutions to technical questions please see our Technical Assistance page.
Customer Reviews
5 out of 5
Based on 1 ratings:
6 of 6 found this helpful:
Pretty darn useful
These pins are great to work with. They don't take chips (8 pin-28 pin) as easily as normal female headers, you have to work the pins on the chip to align them with the headers holes before you put them into these. Where they really shine is how they hold the chips. They lock into place securely and once in, the chip won't move, no intermittents, no loose connection, and once the chips pins are shaped, they slide right in and out easily. They're easier to snap apart than typical female headers for defined length and they have a lower profile. I much prefer these to normal female headers.
What's Swiss on those? Looks of rather chinese origin? :-)
:0)
Swiss most likely refers to the machine used to make the pins. Swiss style turning centers are the ideal tool to make large quantities of small objects quickly.
I havent used these before, are they compatible with standard pin?
I second this question. Are they compatible with standard male header pins?
The ones I just purchased do not fit the standard square breakaway headers. I found this description misleading, and maybe they just got a bad batch, but it seems the ones I have mate only with other machine pin headers.
They also mate very well with ICs. I actually use these very heavily in place of standard DIP sockets. The price is far more expensive, but the benefit is worth it in my opinion. Sockets tend to be crowded underneath which prevents adding any parts under the IC. Using these, I'm able to use Parallax Propeller chips with the crystal and EEPROM all under the chip itself with room for more -- very nice way to save space on a board. It's even possible to put the programming pins that connect to the PropPlug under the chip if you use 90 degree angled headers (you'd need to have the edge of the chip near the edge of the board to get to it).
I like the idea of placing Xtal, eeprom and so on under the Propeller chip, it's the reason I am looking at this right now!! love the idea of putting prop plug headers under it too, excellent! :D
Thanks so much for the comment. I almost just bought square pegs for a round hole assuming like you that they'd fit.
SFE, is there any chance you could carry these in 40-pin strips?
Why not stock the 64 pin version of this instead? Or at least the 40 to match the male counterpart?
These headers are AWESOME! Why? You can stick solid core 22awg (22 gauge) wire right into them and it will hold it very strongly. Stronger than a male machine header pin, even. There's a downside to this though: If you do stick some 22awg wire into one of these female headers it will render that female header unusable with regular male machine header pins forever. As in, once you go 22awg you never go back (hehe)!
Having this knowledge, I find it easier to make male machine header connectors by plugging 22awg wire into the female headers and then soldering them like that. Soldering wires to the male machine pin headers is kind of a pain. Best way I've found is to plug the male headers into a breadboard and solder them that way. Not that different from trying to solder wires directly to male square headers (aka Dupont headers).
What is the purpose of this type of header? Recently got a whole bunch of headers from Ebay (very low, sometimes none, shipment costs :) ), both male and female, but the standard 2.54mm male headers do not fit in this type of female header. After coming across this page I read about there being round and square varieties and they don't seem to be compatible with each other.
So why does the round female variety even exist since you can't seem to use it with standard male headers?
Machine pin ("round") headers are more reliable (and typically more expensive) than square-pin headers. They grip tighter and provide more points of contact, which helps in high-vibration environments. I personally prefer them, but as you've found they're incompatible with square-pin headers; you need to use all one or the other.
Standard components fit in them very well, however - especially DIP/DIL parts (chips, matrx displays, etc.) and jumper wires, which tend to fit rather too loosely in the other headers.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/12pcs-2-54mm-40Pin-Break-Away-Female-Headers-Swiss-Machine-Pin-/370640095302?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item564bdf0846 one set of headers for 3.95$ or 12 sets of headers for 5.70$ish ... please tell me why
OK. As a small business, we're limited in the amount of inventory we can handle. If you look at the part numbers for our newest items, you'll see that we're currently in the 11000s. Each item we carry costs us something in the space required to store and handle it, and since each item needs to "pull it's own weight" in revenue, the smaller items tend to pay an unfair price in higher retail costs. Compare that to a huge company like Digi-Key (who we're big fans of by the way), which stocks literally millions of parts, and can take advantage of the economy of scale to sell those parts at lower prices.
So you might ask why carry small parts at all? The answer is that although we're not going to be the next Digi-Key (they're so good at it we're not even going to try), we DO want to be your one-stop shop for your projects, and so we carry parts like header strips, standoffs, and wire that you tend to need on almost every project. We hope that even though the price on these parts is a bit higher, that the convenience of not having to go to a second (or third or fourth) company to place additional orders will be worth it.
+1 for pointing out the realities of a small business.
When I was there last they didn't have nice, detailed descriptions, comments, and examples like SFE has, which is why SFE is my first stop.
On your site, I can find the parts quickly. Perhaps your small parts are more expensive, but the convenience is well worth it for my situation. So please keep stocking the small stuff!
Nice response. Please do keep stocking parts like this. Yes, you can get them more cheaply on ebay, but they come from Hong Kong and China and the shipping times are LONG....
Dear staff,
Do you have anything like this female headers but with longer legs? The longer legs should help a lot!!!
Any updates for either longer round pin female headers or matching round pin male headers? Is anyone aware of cross reference to similar parts from Digikey / Mouser / Allied / ...?
At the moment, the only headers we carry with longer legs is the "Break Away Headers - Long" PRT-10158. I will pass along as a product suggestion. I recommend seeing if digikey.com, mouser.com, or your local electronics store carries them!
Thanks for your quick reply, much appreciated!
Gosh, these things are amazing. Wish they'd just use these instead of those crappy ones on Arduino boards.
zv470, it is possible and very usefull =)
is it possible to plug crystal oscillators into these? I'm thinking of making an AVR developement board where I can plug in different frequency crystals.
You can solder different oscillators to the male headers and then be able to plug them into these female headers.
Yes.
Do you still lose a pin when breaking these apart, like on the other breakaway female headers? These definitely look like they break easier.
Doesn't look like it, the female ones (which loose a pin) don't have the marks in the side (there's a word for that, but I can't think of it right now).
Indentations, that's the word!
Even if a pin does come out, it's easily reusable by itself or back with the group.
they are designed to be broken properly.
No loss of any pins.