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Soldering many wires to small groundpoint
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Charkel:
Hello everyone!

I am pretty new to electronics and playing around with some Arduino HID projects. Now I have to solder like 14 wires to their respecive pin but there is only one or two ground points on the chip.
Is there any trick to soldering a lot of wires to a small ground point? Twinning them together will make a too big of a copper mass to solder on very good.

What's the trick?  ;D Sould I connect the ground with one wire to a blank prototype board and wire in everything together on there?
When I have it on my breadboard there is a long rail so it's so easy but now when it's time to install it in the case I do not wanna use a breadboard
ciccio:
You must solder all 14 wires plus one together, as shown in first image, then cover the joint with heat shrink tubing or some good electrical tape. The added (15th) wire will be the common ground wire.
Google for "soldering wires": you'll find a lot of tricks.
Best regards
pigrew:
This is a common issue with most microprocessor development boards. Optimally, one would want the board to contain a ground pin for every I/O pin. But, with a limited number of GND pins, there is no great way to connect the grounds to the board, especially not with high frequency signals (> 1 MHz, perhaps). This is a very common issue for microprocessor dev boards.

If your connections are going from one board to another, you could get away with a single ground wire between the boards. However, if you actually need so many connections, you'll have to join them together somehow. As already suggested, soldering is an acceptable solution (where there is minimal vibration. vibration can lead to wires breaking.). You may want to look into terminal strips as your interconnect which would look more professional and be more reliable. Using (crimpable) butt splices, you can also crimp multiple wires together.

The best solution may be to make a custom PCB which does the connections for you (A protoboard could work, too). This would provide the best signal integrity.
KL27x:
Your idea is how I would do it. I assume you are deadbug wiring it. I might glue the chip to a small piece of copper clad. Any twisted pair signals, you can solder the ground wire right next to its input pin. Also buy some 30 AWG kynar wire. You do not need big 26 to 24 AWG wire to carry 99% of your signals.

If they are simply unused pins, i just set them to output low and leave them unconnected.
Ian.M:
No dead-bugging.  The O.P said Arduino - so at worst they're plugging into a female header and at best, are soldering to a row of 0.1" pitch pads at the board edge.

Assuming a DIL footprint Arduino board, its probably worth installing the supplied pin headers and soldering the module down on protoboard, preferably Tripad, but you could use matrix board at a pinch.  You can easily run a solid tinned bare copper wire as a bus bar along a row of holes a few rows away from the module edge on each side and link it to the Gnd pin as directly as possible to get an accessible ground pad for each individual ground wire next to its associated I/O pin pad.     Improve signal integrity with a 0.1uF ceramic decoupling cap from the module's 5V pin to your external ground bus.   If its really critical, run copper braid from the USB connector shell to the ground bus on both sides.

Piggybacking the module on a protoboard also gives you the option to drill proper mounting holes in the protoboard . . . ;)
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