Hermetic connectors

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George,

I'm jumping in late, so if you all have already covered this and passed on, I missed it.

Why do you plan to use a connector? Or, to put it another way, why break the "seal" at all? I assume you need to get "power" and "signals" inside the vacuum chamber, but that doesn't necessarily imply using any standard connector.

1) Power. This can be inductively coupled, and, if the coupling would interfere with the device in the chamber, charge batteries and turn off the inductive link when testing. Inductive charging is all the rage for tablets and cellphones these days; here's a cheeeep send-receive pair to play with:

$10 - Inductive Charging Set - 5V @ 500mA max

Or a solar cell, illuminated by a _strong_ light source.

2) Signals. These can be capacitively coupled, though you'd likely want to put your data in digital form and perhaps "package it up" for reliability. Heck, you could even use short-range RF, at least through glass, perhaps some of those cheeep 433MHz transmitter / receiver pairs:

$4 - RF Link Transmitter - 434MHz

$5 - RF Link Receiver - 4800bps (434MHz)

And there's always Bluetooth or WiFi.

Higher initial cost, perhaps, but possible less call for fixing mechanical connector problems ("It was stuck, so I turned it until it freed up...").

Hope there's something helpful in all this.

Frank McKenney

Sure. Some nice 0.1 inch wire wrap headers will give enough length to put connectors on both ends. They'd have to be hand-soldered, though, or else solder would get all over them.

Plus any of the through-hole solutions would have to be leak-checked carefully, which is time consuming.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

pretty much everything.

the orientation is virtually impossible to determine, the pins always break off or get bent, there are incompatible pinouts that results in bent and broken pins, the female receptables always wear out and get scratched causing the pins to get bent or broken. There are locking version of plugs, but nobody seems to knows this so those get broken off or pulled hard enough to damage the receptacle.

All in all it's just a really s***ty design that had about zero thought put into ease of use or durability. It was designed by a committee for sure.

You mentioned power supplies, so you may be using the fat pins which are stronger, but it's still a horrible idea.