Why are these so expensive???

[GoingFastTurningLeft]

Header pins!

I'm trying to find ones that will match up with the connector on the AVRISP2. How is a little piece of plastic and some metal $2?!

Heck, the headers on the board on the cover of the November N&V cost $3.15 a piece!

Somethings wrong when a microcontroller and the jack you'd use to program it cost about the same!

[Robert Reed]

Thats not the only thing wrong. Quality IC sockets cost more than most of the ICs do that they were designed to hold. Small signal transistor sockets (if you can get them) prices far exceeed 95% of the transistors you would place in them. If you really want to get sick, price out some SMD to DIP conversion sockets. In some cases they cost more than the whole project.
And like you, i can never seem to find headers,connectors etc. at what would seem to be a fair price.

[GoingFastTurningLeft]

its reasons like this that any consumer electronics that's getting thrown out in my family or circle of friends goes through me and my desoldering iron first.

I believe all the IC sockets I have were from a surplus dealer. Now only if I had picked up some double wides...

[Dean Huster]

I haven't used sockets for components in my projects for 20 years now with the exception of EPROMs. They add too much board height, you can't solder the top side easily on a double-sided, not-plated-thru-hole board, the cost isn't worth their addition and you're often plagued by intermittents when you socket things. For that matter, I think that a board without sockets looks nicer, prettier and cleaner than one with them.

Beginning with the older 400-series portables (e.g., 453), Tektronix socketed ALL transistors, ICs and tunnel diodes and all boards were interconnected with gold-plated square-poin connectors. After 10+ years of doing this, they realized that the majority of their warranty work was caused by bad or intermittent sockets. Then the 5000-series and the TM500-series were made without sockets with the exception of expensive ICs such as microprocessors and memory (RAM used be expensive back then) and they kept the connectors. With the advent of the 2000-series, they got rid of all sockets and kept only a few connectors. Construction costs went down, reliability went sky-high and they extened their warranties from the original 1 to 3 years.

Dean

[jaem]

Just go to Molex's site - they'll ship free samples of headers and connectors of all sorts - even complete cable assemblies (USB and such).

They can be a bit slow though (about 1 week, or a bit more sometimes), but I've gotten stuff faster.

[Dave Dixon]

Samtec offers samples as well. They even pay for shipping! Good luck,
Dave

[GoingFastTurningLeft]

searching for one thing and stumbled upon the last responses...

Thanks!

I actually came across a couple of old ISA boards with tons of header pins on them cleaning out a shelf at work... Can't argue with the price!

[MrAl]

Hi,

I like the machine pin sockets best as i believe they are quality
parts. The cheaper sockets though you have to be careful what
you use them in because they do give out after time and temperature
and the problem socket is often hard to find. Way back when we
would get products returned for repair and often they had simply
bad sockets, but the problem sockets were not easy to find.
This wasnt with high current stuff either, just plain old TTL.

I try to use machine pin sockets for my more important stuff.
Yeah, i dont like the price either but sometimes you just have to.

[Bigglez]

Heck, the headers on the board on the cover of the November N&V cost $3.15 a piece!

You have the November 2008 issue? When did you get it?
The 2007 November issue has a PIX of PCBs with headers
that I paid ten cents each. (I bought a huge box of big 40pin
headers from a local part emporium, and chopped them down
for that cover PIX).

[philba]

Most header pins are "snappable" - I just snap off what ever length I need. I usually buy a bunch from the surplus houses when I place an order. The big distis charge an arm and a leg for them (iirc $10 for a strip of 40 - a quarter per pin. Yikes!).

For example, All Electronics has a 1x40 for $.60.

[Engineer1138]

Bought about 25 pieces of 2x40 header pins, gold plated for $0.17 each from BG Micro a few months ago. I made a little tool to cut them at the "snap indents." I use them to make AVR ISPMk1 headers (2x5)

Can't get much cheaper than that; I should have just gotten a round 100 and had close to a lifetime supply!

[Bigglez]

You have the November 2008 issue? When did you get it?

Okay, I've dug through my email inbox far enough to see the
November 2008 issue of N and V was released on Friday (10/24).
The print copy should be here in a few days!

[Bob Scott]

I haven't used sockets for components in my projects for 20 years now with the exception of EPROMs.

SNIP
With the advent of the 2000-series, they got rid of all sockets and kept only a few connectors. Construction costs went down, reliability went sky-high and they extened their warranties from the original 1 to 3 years.

Dean

I agree that sockets did make reliability a problem and were not required most of the time, but remember, everyone was used to tubes at that time. It was hard to conceive of an active circuit where the active device would last "forever".

Of all the tooling boards with hundreds of DIP ICs that I made in San Jose from 2000-2004, every IC went into a machined socket. I don't remember a single failure from circuit reliability. They finally make sockets right and we don't really need them anymore.

[Bigglez]

You have the November 2008 issue? When did you get it?

Okay, I've dug through my email inbox far enough to see the
November 2008 issue of N and V was released on Friday (10/24).
The print copy should be here in a few days!

Print copy reached my mailbox yesterday...