Rant: D Connectors

[German_EE]

The situation with D connectors really bugs me. Most of the world (including the IC manufacturers) live in a 0.1 inch x 0.1 inch world and everything fits in here from displays and chips to a large number of connectors. Not the D type though, that second row of pins offset from the first means that you have to either make your own PCB or use an adapter. When making a PCB mounted socket or plug it would have been just as easy to make the pins on a 0.1 x 0.1 grid, just bend the wires a bit, but they just couldn't do it.

OK, rant over, I have 12 holes to drill between the existing holes on a piece of perfboard.

[Alex Eisenhut]

That's why you use an IDC connector that uses ribbon cable to go to the board, perfectly fine grid there.

[Gyro]

If you can put up with mounting the D-sub connector at the edge of the board, then you can solder one row and hand wire the other one. I've done it for small RS-232 adaptors in the past. Just a thought.

[N2IXK]

The D-subminiature connector line dates back to 1952, well before the DIP package that ushered in the 0.1" grid standard.

Not sure why you would expect it to conform to a standard that didn't yet exist...

[floobydust]

So you prefer micro-USB? SNAP BREAK BUST FAIL

[T3sl4co1l]

Centronics style connectors have arbitrary dimensions.  GPIB for instance isn't apparently metric or imperial, it's just odd.

Doesn't matter when you've got PCBs.  Doing perf board?  Put it on pigtails...

Tim

[Someone]

Most of the world (including the IC manufacturers) live in a 0.1 inch x 0.1 inch world and everything fits in here from displays and chips to a large number of connectors.

No, the world has moved on from those days. Metric is now driving pin pitches 0.7, 0.5, 0.4mm so on and through hole is disappearing rapidly.

[DBecker]

I think that the original poster's point was that the PCB footprint doesn't necessarily need to match the connection pin pitch.  It would be useful to have a D-shell connector that has a 0.1" footprint.

[Vtile]

Long live D-sub. 

[Andreas]

OK, rant over, I have 12 holes to drill between the existing holes on a piece of perfboard.

Hello,

I cannot complain: My D-Subs fit. Always.

with best regards

Andreas

[viperidae]

RJ11/12/45 sockets are the same, two rows of offset pins that won't fit a perf board.

[TheUnnamedNewbie]

I think the flawed assumption here is that the potential advantage of having a connector (or anything really) fit a .1" perfboard outweight all the other advantages of not having it fit - like how easy it is to route on an actual pcb, strength, density, etc.

Also, most manufacturers no longer live in a imperial-driven world. The only things really still imperial (but actually it's not) is SMD footprints like the typical "1206, 0805, 0603, 0402" (even though I believe they are actually defined in metric and then translated to imperial to match, with a 0402 actually being 1.000mm long and 0.500mm wide). In fact, I usually get annoyed by the old DIP footprints and headers not fitting nicely on my metric grid PCBs, making nice allignment a PITA.