 IMPI brought to you by Digikey and Adafrit this week. It is from TE Connectivity. Lady Aida, what is this week's IMPI? Okay. TE comes around. Again, it's time for them. They do make a lot of connectors. This came up on digikey.com slash new, which is what I like to check every day to see the latest sensors, devices, chips, and more. Do check it out because you'll get a heads up on the latest NPIs. This week we're going to be looking at SMT terminal blocks, which I didn't know existed. I learned a thing and I found a thing. I'll probably use the thing on an upcoming design. This is what they look like, and I'll also show it on the overhead. Maybe actually I'll do that now. I'll show it to you actually because you really want to see it in 3D. This is a normal terminal block, and I'll talk about those in a moment. This is an SMT terminal block, so you see it's designed to fit flat on a PCB, whereas these go through the PCB. Okay, great. Now that I've shown what this looks like, let's go to the next slide. TE makes a lot of terminal blocks. They make 169 different kinds of terminal blocks and terminal block accessories. The ones that you're most used to, or at least I'm most used to, are these, they're called tourmy blocks, and they're called captive cage where you turn the screw at the top and this little mouth opens and closes. I'll show that also on the overhead later. You sort of them through the PCB and they come in various pitches from 2.54 millimeter, about 0.1 inch, so 3.5 millimeter is popular. I tend to use those 3.81 millimeter and 0.08 millimeter, which is 0.2 inches. There's also I think even bigger ones, but those are the kind of the most common sizes. And terminal blocks are super useful when you have a board and you want to connect wires to them and the wires don't come with like a pre-made connector. So to be honest, often it's motors for us because motors tend to come with bare wires. They don't come with connectors, your standard size connectors, solenoids, some sensors, and you want to connect them to your board. Terminal blocks are, they're very easy to use, right? You don't need special tools, you just need a screwdriver. You know, they're easy to swap around, they're easy to customize. You can also put multiple wires into one terminal block. So we've used them so like in the Cricut board is one of the first boards that really used a lot of terminal blocks. We also have terminal block feather wing. You can see here, it's got like a long line of terminals, one for each pin on the feather. You know, again, it makes it easy to take something that is breadboard friendly and make it wire friendly, especially like for thicker wires that don't plug into a solderless breadboard. The good news is these are easy to use, they're very common, they're jelly bean parts. The problem is you need a selective solder machine to really solder these in or wave soldering or do it manually because it's not an SMT process. We've even had a series of posts about what you have to do. Like they don't go through a surface mount machine like a pick in place, you have your board surface mounted and then you take it out and you have to manually place by hand all the connectors and then, you know, use this other machine as you saw me modeling it. We've had KISS 102 but there's, you know, lots of different selective solder or wave soldering machines and then it puts down the thick amounts of solder needed to make the McCann connection and then you can see on this board, the bottom of the Cricut, you can see what it looks like, you've got these little Hershey's Kisses of solder and each terminal block is pretty big, it needs a lot of solder. So, you know, the good news is that these are nice strong common connectors. The problem is that you need this secondary process to use them, which is kind of a pain, especially if you only need like one or two terminal blocks. If you have a lot of them, you know, the cost and it's not a big deal like you might, if you're gonna do a couple, you put all of them down and you have the selective or the wave, do all of them at once. But if you only have like one or two terminal blocks, like on our, you know, Buckaroo Banzai, which is a very simple little motor controller, we actually, you know, we wanted a surface mount terminal block because we really don't want to put a board this small and this inexpensive through a second selective solder process just for one terminal block, it just wasn't worth it. But all the motors that we were using for pumping water, they always come with bare wires on them. And so this is a terminal block that you kind of see inside there's like a little, like a wedge and you stick the wire in and you can loosen it by pressing down, but these are, they're not as elegant, I think, as the screw type terminal blocks, they were more likely to get damaged. People would press down too hard, they wouldn't press down hard enough or like they got jammed, so you can't really see what's going on inside, like you have to really push. It was not, the user interface was not as elegant in my opinion as the captive cage blocks. And so it was really neat to see these T terminal blocks pop up that have SMT tabs and they come in a variety of sizes. All of them do about 16, 18 to about 28 to 30 gauge. So you cover your most popular 20 gauge segments. You can use stranded or solid core. That's another thing. You can't use stranded core with those push type or a stranded core. I mean, you can use it just fine with the captive cage type blocks. They come in various sizes up to seven pin, 3.81, 3.5, and five millimeter blocks are all available. So they're kind of standard sizes. And, you know, amperes of current. And they're, you know, pretty easy to use. They, you know, as expected, instead of a through hole pad, use a big surface mount pad. And you want to get those pads to be really chunky. You want a lot of mechanical strength because there's going to be torque on the connector. There's also, if you can see some in the bottom left hand section, there's two positioning holes. And the positioning holes help with the torque because as you're opening and closing these terminal blocks, you know, you're twisting the top and it's really easy to twist it. You know, you're going to twist it all the way, one way, twist it all the way, the other way. And the terminal block holes, which are not present on through hole style and it's easy to forget to add those. You do have to add them. They'll keep the board from shearing off the PCB because you don't have those through hole connections, giving you mechanical stability. So those are not optional. But if you want a terminator, that's going to be your best friend and great for surface mount processes. I know why you humans cry. Yes, I know. This is a weird scene. But I was thinking about terminators and I was like, well, this is your hands up friendly terminator. I think that this is, you know, it's going to be more expensive than through hole terminators, which are very jelly bean parts. But if you only need one or two and you don't have to go through that secondary process, it could save you a lot of time, effort and money. So do check it out. They're available in the universe. Lengths and stuff. Undigkey in stock. Do check the pitch and number of pins because there's like 20 different versions. Hi, I'm Ipia.