 Hi, on MPI! Hi, on MPI, brought to you by Digikey and Adafruit. This week, it's from Wago. Lady, you know, what is this week's Eye on MPI? Ooh, this week's Eye on MPI is pretty exciting. It's terminal blocks. Now, you might be like, terminal blocks aren't that exciting. These are really good terminal blocks. This is the 2601 series of terminal blocks available at Digikey. I'm showing here just the image of the four terminal block wide version, but of course, they're available from anything from like one up to 12 pieces in a row. On the bottom, you see there's two pins for each one. That's for mechanical stability. Basically, this is a wire to board connector. You have bare wires, either stranded or solid cord. You want to connect them to a circuit board. This is a great way to interface them from Wago, the 2601. So most people are familiar with terminal blocks that look like this. There's little screw terminals at the top and you open them up with a screwdriver and the little mouth opens. You stick the wires in and you close them and then that makes a good mechanical connection without using a specialized cable connector. Like you might be wondering, well, why not just use a JSTPH or similar wire to board connector that actually has a housing and contact? Well, those are usually not rated for very high currents. They're not inexpensive and sometimes they have voltage limitations. What it says about terminal blocks is they're inexpensive. They're extremely popular. They're kind of self-documenting. You don't have to worry about the connector coming loose. You can use stranded or solid core wire. They're very, very flexible and they're available in 3.55 millimeter widths. And like again, like I mentioned, they're just extremely easy to use and popular. Like we've been using them for a very long time. However, there's some trade-offs. The standard terminal blocks, again, like I mentioned, have the screw terminal top. But first off that sometimes they're fill up, sometimes they're flathead. You have the wrong one or you have the wrong size. You can easily strip them. It's sometimes also possible to insert the wire into like the rising part of the terminal block. So you think it's connected but it's actually not. It can come loose. But basically you have to have the right tool for them. That said, we do use them a lot. Here, this one is a flathead screwdriver whereas I think these next ones are Philips. But we use them a lot for motors and power supplies and again, anything with over 12 volts or over five amps, it's kind of hard to get a wired to board connector with socket and plug that can handle that current. But we don't like the terminal blocks in some use cases because they're not completely infallible. Like people can kind of mess them up. And like I said, you think the wire's in but it's not or it's loose. And you need the right tool. If you want more information about terminal blocks because there are a couple of different types, I did notice that Digikey has a great video talking about the PCB mount, which is what I tend to use, the barrier strips which are often used in telephony and feed through, which I think is used mostly for electronic or electrical work. The Wagyu ones, the 2601s, they come in two types. There's the horizontal type. These are really nice renderings showing them off with the levers. And then this is the diagram in the data sheet. These are 3.5 millimeter spacing. So they're very compact. I don't like to use terminal blocks that are more compact than this. They do make them smaller, but I find 3.5 millimeter is perfect, you know, boundary of having not too much board space taken up by the terminal blocks, but also you can use a variety of different wire thicknesses. There's also the vertical style, which I think is kind of neat. So this way the wires go in the top and the levers stick at the side. Again, you can get, you know, any range. I'm just showing like the four or five pin, but they do come, you know, up to like, I think 12 plus in a row. And it looks like you can even snap them together if you need to. So for the connections, you can use 26 to 16 gauge. If it's stranded 24 to 16 gauge, and you can actually also push and terminate. So you say solid connector, conductor push and termination. If they're very thin wires, of course, or stranded, you have to open the lever and put the wire in and then close it. But if you're using a solid core wire, you can actually kind of just push it in. As long as it's 20 gauge or thicker, it'll push through and it'll make good contact. And they're rated for very high current. I think, let's move on the side actually, because I think it was 10 amps, 300 volts and they're ULIEC tested as well. So these are very high current, very high voltage. And there's a video that we'll show later that actually, you know, people are like, how do you know, you know, what happens if you try to put 50 amps through it? They actually show what happens when they take a Waggo wire nut connector and they put a massive amount of current through it and they show like everything melts, but the contact is full. We have two videos that we'll show at the end. So three minutes altogether, I think it's worth it. Yeah, they make really good stuff. And you know, if you're making a product that has very high current capacity, motor drivers, power management, electrical work, you really do want something that's rated for the high voltage and the high current. And these are absolutely going to give you exactly what they say on the tent. So check out all the different options. You know, I picked up, I'll show in the overhead, I picked up some of the five wide horizontal ones but they've got different ones in stock. So, you know, whichever one you like. And then they also have the EDA for your layout, circuit board layout software where there's Altium or Orcad. Or Ilocad, you can download the footprint and get going. But these are very nicely made. You know, just in case it wasn't clear, these are available on DigiKey. They are in stock. And they are in stock. There's 450 in stock at the time of this printing. That's right. All right, so you want to show these options. Yeah, because they're, first of all I want to try out the overhead because we updated the overhead. So they're very nice snappy style and you can really tell that they're closed or not. They have a nice clicking effect. Oops, sorry. There's a keyboard. It's a keyboard. So you can open, for a stranded wire, you'll open it and you can see the throat open up and then when you snap it closed, it closes. But as I mentioned, if you have a solid core wire, in this case, I... It'll be dangerous. I'm going to zoom in. Oh, you're going to zoom in? Okay. Look at this. Oh wow, that's nice. So you can actually, you can see the throat terminal. Let's see how much I can zoom in. Whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Okay, back in a beep, beep, beep, beep. Okay. So you can see here, it makes a really nice grip and then what's also nice is on the side, they tell you up to, you can see it says nine, so up to nine millimeters wide. So you can also just use, I was again, I didn't realize you could just push the terminals in but nice feel, nice, good, strong connection. It doesn't, you can push in but you can't pull out, it's like the hotel, California. So this is the Wrago 2601 terminal blocks, very fancy, very nice. strongly recommend it if you want something a little better than just plain screw top terminal blocks. Okay. And we're going to play, they have two really good videos and we're going to play them back to back. Okay. The 222 series connectors are designed for a nominal current of 32 amps. All of these connectors not only exceed the relevant normative requirements but also provide an additional safety range compared to the normative minimum requirements. This safety range reflects Wrago's high quality requirements while providing maximum safety even in exceptional circumstances. For example, even in the case of an invalid overload of several times the nominal current the connectors functionality is provided beyond the stability of other equipment. In the event of a failure of more than three times the nominal current, the conductor insulation melts and the wire starts glowing. This is not the case for Wrago's 222 series splicing connector. Both the connectors electrical functionality and housing insulation remain intact. The connector housing will only melt after a prolonged overload and will eventually drop off the contact. The contact is still intact and the wires remain securely connected. Even after such an extreme test the contact points continue to meet the normative requirements in terms of contact quality. Wrago, quality from the... Hi, I'm Evia.