Connectors - Understanding Electrical Specifications

After yet another interesting day at the office, I reached my room at night. I went straight to my desktop PC. Today I’ve taken some pictures of the new company and I plan to upload it on the internet. I turned the UPS on and waiting for the system boot. I heard a beep sound from somewhere; it’s not from the system but from my mobile phone. Low battery again! Alright; I’ll plug it into the system once it booted. But for my surprise, there is a dialogue in the LCD screen, “no signal”. Perhaps my power cord has broken again. I’m not wasting any time. I’ve another new power cord with me. I removed the damaged one and connected the new power cord and tried again and it works.

Now I’ve my digital camera and my mobile phone in my hand, both of them need to be connected to the system. But I’ve only four USB ports and all of them are in use. I’ve already connected my portable hard disk, data card, mouse and a pendrive. I need two usb ports and I know that I’m not using the portable hard disk and the pendrive at this moment, so I can remove them. I pugged in the digital camera, and my mobile phone. I went online, shared my photos, and did some chatting. After an hour, my mobile phone has full charge. I removed it from the USB port, plugged in my headset and went to bed. That’s the end of the story!

Now just rewind things. I’ve changed the damaged power cord of the PC. Will it be possible if the wire is directly soldered to the mother board? Secondly I’ve removed two devices from the USB port. Can you imagine the USB devices permanently hanging down from the USB port and not removable? Then I plugged in my headset. How will you feel when the long wires of your headset always hanging down from your stylish mobile phone?

THANKS TO CONNECTORS!!

Let’s take a journey to the world of the electrical connectors. What is an electric connector?

It is nothing but a simple, small size electro-mechanical device. It is basically use to connect two or circuits together. It is possible for the circuits to transfer power or signal through the connectors. Connectors have one more metallic structure inside it for electrical connections.

The connectors always provide a temporary connection between the circuits.

This temporary connection has so many advantages over the permanent connections. You can easily replace a particular circuit in a system; you can check the input or output of a circuit independently etc. Moreover the connector provides easy assembling and troubleshooting.

Consider the following figure. How many different connectors are there in the unit? There are different circuit boards and the different circuit boards are assembled together using the connectors to form a control unit.  Some connectors are used to connect wire to board, some are used to connect board to boards, some are connected to the power supply etc.

It was of course possible for the designer to assembly the entire circuit in a single board. But what could be the reason that the designer adopted this method? In this method one can easily assembly the circuit. Each board can be separated easily from the unit and tested individually. Most of the cases there is no need to physically separate the board to be tested from the unit, but just remove the connectors from that board. It provides option to upgrade some boards and components and there by improve the performance of the unit whenever possible. Another important thing is that mast of the connectors can be connected together in only one possible method, hence it avoid the possibility of wrong connections.

Connectors in a control unit