Learned something new today

[Christer Karlsson]

Just finished a new card, and as I was to put it in permanently, I could not get the holes to line up so I could put a nylon spacer between the cards. When I started to look closer I noticed that the right-angle male pin-headers came in two different flavors.

1) The plastic insulator is on the head part of the pins.

2) The plastic insulator is on the tail part of the pins. (see photo).

And yes it does make a difference.

[Martin Giese]

It certainly makes a difference!  I also have both varieties in the parts box, without really knowing why.  And I regularly break off the required numbers of pins before realising that I took the wrong ones again…

[Wayne Hortensius]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2025 11:13:46 -0700 (PDT)
Christer Karlsson wrote:

> ...I noticed that the

> right-angle male pin-headers came in two different flavors.
>
> 1) The plastic insulator is on the head part of the pins.
> 2) The plastic insulator is on the tail part of the pins. (see photo).

And there's even a third flavour. Long pins on both ends, and you (I)
clip off the long end that goes through the PCB after soldering. I
ordered these from DigiKey and only noticed once they got here that
they would work either way.

Wayne

[David Lochlin]

Thanks for pointiing this out. I just fiinished building the Classic II and bought all the parts from different suppliers. Did not notice any problems so must have ordered the correct ones in my ignorance. Have just started on a new project that require the 2 x 40 pin variety. Haven't received them from AliE yet so hope I got it right again. 

Dave

[John Sandlin]

On my zed pro setup, I noticed the single row headers and dual row headers are different heights relative to each other.

I do have a question on the spacers everyone is using - what length works best? I measured the spacing and it looks like 12mm should be good.

[Mark T]

There are two types of single row header pins. The bend in the pins between the plastic and the pcb will give the same height as the double row header pins. The standard RC2014 header pins with the bend in the pins after the plastic will change the height and also change the space between modules with single row and dual row header pins.

13mm spacer between modules with the same header pins should work ok for backplanes with 0.6 inch (15.24mm) connector centre spacing.