Good evening. I was planning on testing my Baby Pac Vidiot board “on the bench”, via the instructions at Pinrepair.com’s awesome Baby Pac-Man page. I ordered some 12 pin and 2 pin .156 Molex in-line housings from Bob Roberts. Because they were so cheap, I ordered some extra connectors, including some headers and sets of monitor connectors. Here’s what I got today (picture taken after I ate the Moon Pies that he included in the box)

The 4 small bags in the upper left that are the same size are sets to make monitor connectors. They contain (1) 3 pin .156 housing, and (1) 6 pin .156 housing. Below those on the left are .100 headers that can be snapped to get the size needed. Below that are 24 pin .156 headers that are also “snappable”. The right side shows (4) 12 pin .156 housings, and (4) 2 pin .156 housings. That’s what I’m using for this tutorial.

OK…I needed an easy way to hook up alligator test leads like this (from Rat Shack)…

…to header connectors on my Vidiot board like this:

That image shows a 5 pin header. The Vidiot board has 12 pin and 2 pin headers, but you get the idea. I can’t just hook alligator leads to these because they could touch each other. It would also be difficult to put 2 clips right next to each other in that small footprint. I decided to make some test connectors that I can reuse…there may be a better way to do this, but this is how I made mine.

First, I took some .093 molex socket connectors that I got from Bob Roberts and opened them up by forcing a small screwdriver in the end and wiggling it around. This pic shows one of those pins, before and after.

I crimped the end on an 18 AWG wire. Then, I took some shrink wrap tubing, and cut it so it would be a little bigger than the connector.

Next, I slid the shrink wrap tubing over the end, making sure it was sticking past a little bit. After heating it with a lighter, here’s what it looked like:

The idea with this is to have a connector I can easily clip a lead to while still being insulated, like so:

The 2 pics above show the first connector I made for this. The end of the shrink wrap tubing didn’t shrink tight enough around the wire end. For the rest of these, I put a small piece of narrower shrink wrap tubing on that area to build it up a little thicker before putting the wider tubing over it.

Here are 2 finished test connectors ready to go. I alternated the length of the wires so adjacent connectors won’t have any chance of touching.