There are a million guides on this, and I'm not going to belabor the basics; there are a few key issues that cause the vast majority of the difficulties hobbyists have with these. The two different capitalizations is intentional. "DuPont connectors" as the term is used in this document, refer to the "real" MiniPV connectors, or the ones produced more recently by Berg or Amphenol. "dupont connectors" are the low quality chinese version. See the history section for details.
It's sad that this is what I feel a need to cover first, but it is, unfortunately, very common for dishonest manufacturers in China and places with similar lax regulatory enforcement to intentionally try to pass wire off as thicker than it is. It is not uncommon to find wire marked "22 AWG", strip it, and discover 17 strands 0.1mm-0.11mm: it's 26 AWG, not 22! That part of the deception is bad enough (counting the strands in stranded wire every time you buy wire is a pain, plus you need to be able to measure the diameter of the strands to 0.01mm. It makes a great deal of difference if the strands are 0.1 mm or 0.14 mm in diameter; that's the difference between 23 gauge and 25 gauge). What makes this practice even more pernicious is that in order to make the wire look like the claimed gauge, they make the insulation thicker. Terminals were designed with normal, non-dishonest insulation thicknesses, and so the maximum size of wire you can use ends up being limited by this stupid excess insulation and it is hard to get a good cromp on both at the same time. This is mostly a problem when wiring things up with smaller JST connectors, where you probably want the maximum current rating, but can't fit such a wire between the insulation tabs, because of the bloated insulation layer.
It isn't even universal there, but it is common enough to find it in assembled equipment too.
Some of them are most certainly willing and enthusiastic participants in this fraud. Others do not appear to be aware that it's even a thing - they have pictures in which it is abundantly obvious that the conductors are undersized. There is also a complication in the form of the metric and english units. There are many listings where the product matches the metric specifications described on the product listing, but the AWG rating is 2-3 gauge larger than what you would calculate for the metric specification. For example, ones that describe 17x0.1mm wire as 22 AWG (it's 26AWG). If you knew that it was 26 AWG wire marked as 22, and you wanted to scam people, you wouldn't list the real size right next to it. I have a feeling that there's an ongoing war between manufacturers and consumers of wire. I've read articles where people associated with higher end Chinese companies which offer warrantees describe dozens of pieces of equipment failing soon after installation - due to undersized wire. I doubt they put them together fully aware of how undersizaed the wire was. Likely the wire got switched to a different brand claiming the same specs, and they took their word (maybe they got one lot of accurately marked stuff before the manufacturer switched to sending them the fake stuff).
Wire that isn't super cheap is better. That fancy, expensive FEP-insulated wire generally meets spec, or is "only" half a gauge short. Wire that's dirt cheap and has fewer specs listed rarely does. More knowledable sellers who specialize in wire are more likely to have the good stuff, and know which of their wire is mismarked. The worst kind of wire for this problem is the the colored "hookup wire" (also called "UL1007") which is sold at rock bottom prices and almost universally marked dishonestly.
FEP is a lot like PTFE (Teflon), but is less heat resistant (they are, chemically, very similar). While my PTS-10 thermal stripper can strip "FEP" wire, albeit with a bit more patience, the batch of wire I have marked "PTFE" just laughs the PTS-10. I now have a PTS-30 tears through either of them, but that's a $140 stripper that's not good for normal wire, and it's a good deal less convenient to use). Both kinds of insulation suck to strip with mechanical strippers, but it can be done with the FEP insulated stuff by an individual of tyical skill. The same isn't true of actual PTFE (though note also that many vendors don't know the difference and call FEP-insulated wire PTFE-insultated)
These are the most common jumper cables. More often found as female-to-female jumpers than other gender combinations (with good reason - female terminal pushed onto male header makes a better connection, and female terminals are cheaper than male ones, while male header is not only cheaper but can be easily cut to length (female header has several problems - but that's mostly for a different document). Female headers are meant to engage male header, not male dupont line (yes, I know the Arduino boards were designed with female header and male dupont pins in mind - but that's about the only place it's done - otherwise, the development board has male header on the board and you use female dupont line). Commercial products that aren't development boards will only use pin header for board-to-board connections typically, and use something better for wire-to-board. Development boards have to be different becasue they support single wire jumpers being used, and you want to fit two jumpers on two adjacent pins. There aren't many connectors that fit over your usual pin header and can be individual jumpers, with a housing, and fit onto adjacent pins.
For some reason, these always seemed incredibly hard to crimp, harder than other common connectors - considering how central they are to hobby electronics, this was rather frustrating. Years later, I think I've figured out all the problems (which are not well covered by most tutorials).
At least not if you want acceptable results.The same is true of 99% of other crimp tools. The best you can get is a mediocre crimp, and the more frequent result is a total failure.
If you want to crimp dupont/DuPont terminals, you must get a crimper that has a round insulation crimp die. See the tools list for more discussion, but these are rare.
Most crimp connectors bend both the wire crimp and the insulation crimp tabs into a "B" shape. Accordingly, that's what most crimp tools try to do, including the SN-28B.
Unfortunately, DuPont terminals need the insulation tabs wrapped around the wire. The form needs to be round, not B-shaped. Actually, maybe unfortunately is the wrong word, because it's nothing to do with fortune, and everything to do with physics. They needed the terminals to fit into a hole in a housing that's only 0.1" square on the outside, but still fit around a standard header pin. If you look at all the other crimp connectors, you'll find that the housing for, say, a 0.1" pitch connector is usually considerably wider than 0.1". So they were pretty much forced into that design decision, they didn't do it just to make life hard on us.
Until recently, there weren't decent generic crimp tools with the correct shaped die available, despite how common these connectors were. As a result, people used inappropriate crimp tools that did a lousy job. You'd make a mess trying to tighten a flat-head screw with a phillips screwdriver, too. Where there was a will, there was a way, however, and the lack of tools that could make a decent crimp (short of used dupont and harwin crimpers which cost hundreds of dollars new) was not enough to deter people from, through hard work, patience, and many ruined connectors, making their own cables using tools like SN-28B's. Many of these people then wrote the guides you all see around the internet. If you replace the tool in their hands with an appropriate one, their guides are generally sound, and their crimping job far better.
Using the right crimp tool will make things far easier, and makes it possible to get good results, rather than barely acceptable ones (the examples of a "good crimp" shown in many guides with the SN-028B look like crimps that I would cut off and redo), and success rates of >95% instead of <50%. Two cheap ratchet-type crimp tools that I know of are the SN-025, and the TZ-4228B. They both do a pretty good job, though I think I get better results with the Toozo one - it is also a much more useful crimper. The SN-025 has 2 other slots for... some sort of mysterious connectors that also require the same shape crimp. The TZ-4228B, on the other hand, has 3 other slots, sized appropriately for JST-PH, JST-XH or JST-SM, and JST-VH, among others. In other words, the most popular connectors in hobby and light electronics!
Have you noticed how some dupont jumpers seem to be worse than others? Even though they were both made with knockoff "dupont" terminals? Like, they made poor connections almost immediately and go downhill from there? That's because there are several versions of the "dupont" terminals available at hobbyist prices (a couple of cents a piece). All of these are knockoffs of a knockoff of the DuPont Mini PV connector...). The design is almost identical, but the cheaper ones have a shorter wire crimp and generally seem to be using less metal wherever they can. Avoid those at all costs. They won't even crimp right in the good crimp tools because they're the wrong size! To help recognize the good ones, try to get the "half gold" plating (sometimes marketed without the "half" part - but the gold plating you see in the picture is clearly only on the mating half of the connector). The gold plating is desirable (Gold on connectors almost always is), but it's more important as a way of differentiating the good kind of terminals from garbage. The garbage terminals do not (as far as I've seen) come with gold plating. See also below point...
Not specific to dupont connectors. But more confusing here.
AWG 18 through AWG 32 for real DuPont connectors (they come in four sizes for different thicknesses, including a 32-36 AWG one, but I haven't been able to find anyone selling those ). Clone dupont terminals, it's a bit complicated They never are sold with clearly deliniated wire size specs. however my experience is that: The best of the clones works up to 24 AWG, and 22 barely doable (they're just the right size for most "22 AWG" mismarked wire though. They can go down to 30 AWG wire (you might need to tighen the tool a notch), so they're good down to most "26 AWG" mismarked crap wire). The cheaper, crappier ones' only advantage is that, being designed for that hair-thin ribbon cable that the manifactrers of dupont line love, they work on 32-34 AWG, so what the vendors often call 30 gauge. A lot of dupont jumpers use thinner wire. Many of these jumpers will actually fail the pull test (go try it with some of the rainbow-ribbon-cable flavor of jumpers - the terminals pull right off in many cases! Note that this does not happen with the individual precrimped wires sold without the housings, at least not any of the ones I've gotten (they also use the less-bad terminals - at least judging by the length of the terminal), but it does with most other DuPont line (which use the shorter, crappier terminals).
For other types of connectors, particualrly small ones, the most common challenge is that most wire you'll find for sale is mismarked crap wire, and the kind with insulation thin enough to fit the insulation crimp has conductors too thin for the wire crimp. For that reason I often use
Say you have something that would normally take a 1x5 connector. You only need 3 of those (you don't need pin 2 and 4, say) and you make a cable with those three wires, and start using it. Over time, you will notice the cable get less and less reliable at that end - quite rapidly, even if you rarely unplug it. It seems like not having the terminals in all slots lets it move on the pins, and deforms them more quickly. If buying better terminals is out of the question (or your budget) practice your crimping skills a bit, cutting off the terminals when you crimp them. Keep these cut-off crimped junk terminals, and place one o thsese dummy terminals in each of the unused holes, and use pin header all of the pins still present (or clip off only, filling that slot in the housing with glue or something if you want to "key" the connector), where it will help to hold the connector in place. These connectors are unlike any of the other connectors on the list inthat they are held on ONLY by the mating force between pins and terminal. Every other connector has a housing that also locks in place, (sometimes even with a little latch, like JST-GH). There is a style very much like dupont called "dupont MX" which has a latch and uses a different kind of terminal which is much less common (and still has all the other problems)
Many people online talk about a "JST connector" as though that was sufficient information for someone to go buy the matching connector. JST is a company (Japan Solderless Terminals); they make connectors; in fact they are one of the world leaders in that field. JST makes hundreds of types of connectors, many of which have terminals that are crimped in place, are widely used, and look identical in photos if there's no ruler next to them. You should never refer to a "JST connector", nor should you let anyone else get away with that! Specify the type of connector! When I was first getting into electronics, it once took me three tries (waiting a month for shipping each time) just to get a 2-pin connector that matched the development board I was using...
| Series | Pitch | AWG | Max Current | Voltage | Housing sizes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MiniPV | 2.54mm | 18-32 | Up to 3A | 1k max | 1-2 x 2-36 pos |
| "dupont" | 2.54mm | 22-30 | < 2A | ??? | 1-2 x 1-12 pos |
| Superseal | 6.0mm | 22-14 | 14A | ??? | 1-6 pos. |
| JST-XH | 2.5mm | 22-28 | 3A @22AWG | 250 max | 1-20 pos. |
| JST-PH | 2.0mm | 24-28 | 2A @24AWG | 100 max | 1-18 pos. |
| JST-SM | 2.5mm | 22-28 | 3A @22AWG | 250 max | 1-12 pos. |
| JST-VH | 3.96mm | 16-22 | 10A @16AWG | 250 max | 1-12 pos. |
| JST-ZH | 1.5mm | 26-32 | 1A @26AWG | 50 max | 1-12 pos. |
| JST-GH | 1.25mm | 26-30 | 1A @26AWG | 50 max | 1-12 pos. |
| JST-SH | 1.0mm | 28-32 | 1A @28AWG | 50 max | 1-12 pos. |
| "MicroJST" | 1.25mm | 28-32 | 1A @28AWG | 125 max | 1-12 pos. |
| MX 2.0 | 2.0mm | 2-6 pos. | |||
| Microfit 3 | 3.0mm | 1-5 pos. | |||
| 4.2mm |
The original! First produced by DuPont, supposedly as early as the 1950's, which spun out the connector division as Berg. Berg was then bought by Amphenol, one of the giants of the connector industry. They still manufacture the same terminals as always, but you have most likely never seen one. The main difference is immediately obvious if you have the two kinds next to each other (outside of a housing): you can see a leaf spring pressing up against the pin! Word is that the ones you buy now are just as good as the originals, and they certainly do inspire far more confidence, and never feel loose. There are just two problems: 1. They are eye-wateringly expensive: $0.16 for the poverty model in the middle wire range, up to a mindboggling of $2 (qty 1, can be as low as $0.09 to $1.77 if you buy 100 at a time). Most are around 20-30 cents each if you buy 100 at a time. A 6-pin serial cable, even if you omit the CTS line, may cost you more than the arduino pro mini clone you're using it with. 2. Buying them is a terrible experience - catalogs are inexplicable poor (amphenol is known for this), datasheets that vendors link to from product pages, when you're looking at terminals, especially these, suddenly stop havign the part number of the thing you clicked a link from. Really, you've gotta assign a good deal of the blame for this to Amphenol. Why? Because the product line is huge and the material they make available is marginal. The digikey catalog includes hundreds of terminals in this line, if you count the discontinued ones (which you will often find recommended by others on blogs and forums, naturally).
There are 4 parameters to consider - and more combinations than not are available
- Male vs Female (which you hopefully know already - note that male pins are considerably more expensive than female ones - more like 80 cents, likely because of lower volume, yet most of the benefit is seen from switching to official female connectors).
- These terminals are available in four sizes, to accomodate different thicknesses of wire (though the smallest one is is nearly impossible, and u'm unconvinced of their existance.
- Surface treatment - For each of these there is a "Tin" surface treatment and several thickensses of gold plating. Usually the gold costs more - but not always!
- They are available as strip (for a feed-through crimp tool which costs a small fortune) - this strip is end-to-end instead of having a strip to which each connector is tied to. Unlike most crimp connectors you can't fatigue the joint betweeen connector and strip to separate them you need to use wire cutters. They can also be purchased loose but they charge a considerable premium (like 50%-ish) for terminals that aren't on the tape.
- Finally, they are made with three different levels of spring force - you will almost always want "ultra high", and almost never "standard". If you dig out the document that describes them (not always obvious), they tell you when to use which kind: 1-20 pin connectors want Ultra High, 10-40 pin ones can use high, and standard should only be used when there are more than 20 pins per connector. Now, how often have you wanted a 40+ pin dupont connector? Me neither.
This means that there are 7 (tin + 3 gold thicknesses strip, tin + 2 loose) * 3 spring forces * 4 wire thicknesses = 94 permutations of the current production options, for female connectors alone. A few of those don't exist, so its maybe more like 80. Because they have existed for a long time, though, they've gone through several iterations of renumbering (as gold in key areas replaced gold everywhere when gold prices rose, and as they were made lead-free as ROHS regulations went into effect in some jurisdictions). These old entries still clutter lists and catalogs, hence the 200+ results in the catalogs, of which around 80 are in production, and of those, 7 are approriate for a given wire thickness unless you're making gigantic connectors. 2-6 of those are likely to be in stock at a given time, and 1-3 of those are unaffordable loose ones. Sometimes the ones with the thinnest gold surface treatment are the cheapest, other times it's tin, and rarely, you can get a killer deal on 30u gold
Once you finally get your hands on them though, they are very nice connectors. You can feel the difference as you plug and unplug them. The key is that little leaf spring pushing the pin and supplying the mating force, made of phosphor bronze (that is "a real material appropriate for making springy things), and it doesn't degrade over time except through very slow abbrasion. Nothing like the knockoffs do. Use these for cables that are plugged and unplugged often, and/or cause downtime, duress, or delay if they were to get unreliable. If you're hoping to sell whatever it is as a product (other than as a development board) though, these may be prohibitively expensive - and frankly, owing to their not having a latching mechanism in the housing, any product that justifies the cost of the terminals probably should use a connector with some sort of latching mechanism.
The process of buying "DuPont" connector terminals from reputable western vendors sucks. Use the cheatsheet below to find the part numbers that are potentially usable.
| AWG | Tin, CT | 15u Au CT | 30u Au CT | 40u Au CT | Tin, bulk | 15u Au bulk | 30u Au Bulk |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18-20 | 47648-000LF | 48247-000LF | 48252-000LF | 47566-002LF | 47749-000LF | 48256-000LF | 48233-000LF |
| 22-26 | 47649-000LF | 48248-000LF | 48051-000LF | 47565-002LF | 47750-000LF | 48257-000LF | 48236-000LF |
| 28-32 | 47650-000LF | 48249-000LF | 48050-000LF | 47564-002LF | 47751-000LF | 48258-000LF | 48239-000LF |
| 32-36 | 75543-011LF | 75543-017LF | 75543-012LF | 75543-018LF |
Sometimes tin plated ones are more expensive than gold, other times gold is more expensive. The first 5 numbers are the most important - the part after the dash contains additional information, but rarely do suppliers stock two connectors with different second-halves of the part number and the same first half CT denotes cut tape. But it's not the easy-to-separate stuff like most terminals come on, you need to use wire cutters to separate them (or use the feedthrough type tool they are made for). The bulk ones have been separated for you. They cost about twice the already insane price.
For most applications, 22-26 AWG terminals are the most appropriate, particularly if, like I do, you use FEP wire, which has thinner insulation. There's rarely a compelling reason to crimp extremely thin wire, while extremely thick wire often has trouble fitting into the housing after crimping (FEP wire with it's thin insulation helps, of course).
Note that 40u gold terminals are difficult to source outside europe and that AWG 32-36 terminals are nigh impossible to source, anywhere at any price. Until I see one in my hand, I'm not convinced they're more real than fairies and dragons.
The connectors we all know by that name. These appear to be copies of a design by Harwin. Some time after the DuPont version became popular, Harwin wanted to get in on the action and they decided to make their own, but they decided they needed to be able to undercut the price of the originals. A leaf spring for retention, made of a different metal, just wasn't going to do it. They figured out a way to make it from 1 folded up piece of stamped metal. Individuals who have tried the Harwin ones found them to have little advantage over least-bad clones, and just like those, they wore quickly and stopped making reliable connections. The ones you're likely to interact with, of course, aren't even made by Harwin, but by random chinese knockoff manufacturers. Some manufacturers produce a usable if mediocre terminal. The best clones are "half gold" with half of the connector that sees the most action plated with gold flash. They run in the area of 1-2 cents each in quantity. The ones that are the same size but without the gold are priced similarly and only slightly worse (the deformation is what kills them, not corrosion, typically). Those are what individual strands of dupont terminal line typically have crimped onto the end. The rest of the Chinese dupont connectors, including anything sold crimped to ribbon cable, are a tier lower. They often fail a pull-test, and many of them are unfit for any purpose (note the shorter wire crimp. If you unfold them and take calipers to it, you'll find that it's made from a smaller piece of thinner metal. Never apply those to wire yourself, and try to avoid involving yourself with terminal line that comes with that kind.
The "dupont" connector terminals you can find and buy easily from disreputable Chinese vendors suck.
The best of the Chinese dupont connectors are fine for occasional use or as disposable cables (which such dupont line should be considered); You should expect to periodically have to replace the terminals if the wire is frequently connected or disconnected, even with the best clone terminals or terminal line (the terminal line that is sold as separate strands, or obtained by dismembering multiwire cables made up of separate strands is the preferred terminal line. The kind made with ribbon cable is abysmal - cut and strip the wire, and then try to find a tool that can measure a thickness that small in order to determine what gauge wire it. I get something like AWG32 on most of it, and if they specify an AWG, and it comes as ribbon cable, you almost certainly got shorted. The worst examples of dupont terminal line are monuments to shoddy manufacturing that fail the pull test and belong in the trash. (note: these will often pass the pull test if you crimp over the stock crimp with any crimp tool - I suspect they lower the crimp force to extend the life of their tooling - either that, or the tooling is not designed to crimp to wire that thin). I have also seen dupont terminals that rust (ie, they're made of steel, which they're not supposed to)
A big honnkin' bulky connector for automotive applications. Meant to protect from moisture infitltration (I an skeptical about how well it can do that without more than just those little rubber plugs around the wires - but it's certainly far more water resistant than anything else here, and there are low cost rubber boots that can be ziptied in place; the result seems like it could plausiblly keep water out under most conditions). I wouldn't design for them operating over time while the connector was immersed it water or anything, but I can't think of a connector where I would expect that to be okay. But splashes, even rain (with the boots on) isn't a disaster with these. Really, there's only one problem with these (they're not even very expensive).... and that is the fact that they are just huge. Like, 2 inches long for a mated pair of conectors, and the largest size, which is just 6 pins, is over an inch wide. The boots would at least double the length. These are very bulky, but that's the price you pay for the durability. One other tricky part is pin extraction. The female pins are easy to remove, pull red tip towards you, and that unlocks the terminals and you can pull them out. If they stick, you might have to pull the tip out (it goes right back in). The male pins, at the bottom of the inch-deep hole in the connector housing are whole other ball game. Supposedly, you can just put their hook-like extractiobn tool in and pull the red latching mechanism at the bottom of the housing into an unlatched position and then remove the pins. I think I've had it go down like that once. The rest of the time, I've wound up spending like ten minutes or more, with an arsenal of pin extraction tools and mini-screwdrivers, often with several jammed into the connector housing, trying to manipulate some latching mechanism that I can't visualize into letting go of the terminal - just because the red thing hasn't latched the plastic catches into position doesn't mean they have any inclination to move into the unlatched position, and pulling on the wire connected to the terminal you're attempting to extract usually just makes them latch harder.
They are able to carry a larger current than most cheap wire-to-wire connectors, making them good for main power supply lines into higher current devices, and the bulky connector can help to send a message to untrained persons who might be around it: "This is serious business, look at this big connector! Be careful around it and don't mess with it if you're not supposed to!"
No wire-to-board connectors are available.
These are a 2.54 mm pitch wire-to=wire connector (no wire to board), they're rated at up to 3A with the maximum 22 gauge wire - they should not carry the full current with anything less. That includes "22 AWG" wire that isn't actually 22 AWG aas noted above. Many of the prewired connectors are absolutely of miserable quality (they somehow have managed to find a manufacturer who makes knockoff JST SM terminals of a different design and rock bottom quality, to pair with their undersized conductors) - particularly common for the 2-pin ones. Which, unfortunately are what people are most likelty to want to put power through. One nice thing about these is that, after the TE connectors, these are the easiest ones to crimp. The Tozzo and a SN-28B or SN-58B will do the trick without particular difficulty, but the thinner jaws of the Tozzo make it easier to see what you're doing and again make it my preferred tool. Unfortunately, they are disappointing otherwise.
These connectors (with the typical terminals you get when you buy terminals as opposed to wire with terminals on one end) are okay, but only okay. Their biggest selling point is that they are the de facto standard for addressable LEDs. and they're cheaper than dirt. Unfortunately, the direction of the pins on said strings is often exactly what you don't want (you want to feed power and data into the "head" end; with the standard pinout. As supplied by vendors, that means the tail end always has +5V, ground and data on pins sticking out. That of course violates one of the rules of connector design Not good. 5v is rarely dangerous in and of itself, but LED strips can pull enough current that they are frequently backed by beefy power supplies, so a near short on the end of the string could pose a fire hazard without tripping the overcurrent protection on the power supply).
I have not been terribly happy with how these have worked out on my light strings - they are prone to failure modes with intermittant connections, and coupled with design decisions, resulted in a system where a single bad connection on any of 4 daisy-chained connectors would apply 19v to the 5v microcontroller. I lost something like half a dozen in one night once, before I had figured out what the bloody hell was going on. At that point I declared these connectors to be garbage and cut them off all the light strings and replaced with more reliable microfit 3.0.
There are 4 very similar connectors in this line (plus 2 smaller ones, listed below for different reasons), the VH (3.98mm), XH (2.5mm), PH (2.0mm) and ZH (1.5mm), and they are all extremely similar to eachother in shape and style. JST and third parties manufacture headers in both SMT and through-hole versions for ZH and PH, XH only has a few sizes of SMT connectors manufactured by JST, though third parties supply a full range in both right angle and side entry. VH headers are all through hole. Of these connectors, largest three types have terminals that are easily crimped - the Tozzo 4228B has a slot for each, as do many other crimp tools. These are are some of the most common connectors in consumer electronics. VH is somethat uncommon, as is ZH, but I've seen all of them in consumer electronics. PH and XH are ubiquitous in connections from battery packs to PCBs. and PH is very common for cables between PCBs in single piece of equipment, often on the end of white-and-pink or white-and-blue ribbon cable (where each strand has a different pattern of pink or blue marks on it). These are all good choices when they meet the requirements of your application for a wire-to-board connector, and headers for 2-10+ pin lengths are available. There are also wire-to-wire versions (ie, a male pin and housing) for both XH and PH. The XH eems kinda bulky as a wire-to-wire connector, but is readily available. The PH wire-to-wire connectors are less common (apparently, only one of the two is officially made by JST. I can never remember which one it is). Either of these are good choices for wire-to-wire connectors on these grounds. I would pick XH over DuPont connectors for any non-prototyping application. There apparently also exists a wire-to-wire ZM housing and terminal. They are rare and exotic, and I have not fouind them for sale even from western suppliers.
The VH and XH terminals are have a locking farb that is visible externally and can be pushed in with a pin extraction tool to remove wire + pin from the housing. On the PH and ZH, the mechanism is instead a springy piece of plastic on the housing that can be pulled away with a pin extraction tool or anything pointy, like on the dupont connectors. This method is also used on SH, GH, and "MicroJST".
All of these except VH have the widest point of a connector with N pins equal to (N+1) * pitch - a 4p XH is 12.5mm wide, PH 10mm, and ZH 7.5mm. The VH connector doesn't wrap around the sides of the connector, and simply N * pitch wide.
JST-ZH connectors sold on market sites are not made by JST (This is universal. I don't think anything sold on aliexpress was actually made by Japan Solderless Terminal) and some differ from what is shown in the manufacturer datasheet ever so slightly. Viewing it along the long axis, there is no plastic extending past the pins on the third party right-angle through-hole connectors. This provides less support to the shroud, but permits some layouts that are impossible with the genuine headers. And if you really want to, you can push the pins out (you can't pull them out without damage, at least on the ones I have), rotate them 180 degrees and put them back in if you need to put the connector on an unusually thick PCB (this gets you about an extra 1mm). Remember that this reverses the pin order too; don't use it for that purpose outside of an "oops" prototype where you got the connector pinout backwards. On the next board revision, you can fix the pin order to match existing cables, or you can reverse the order of pins in the cable. Modifying the connectors in this way is slow and tedious work with a pair of pliers, much harder than modifiying typical 0.1" pin header: the pins hold onto the plastic tenatiously yet bend easily.
You need something specialized to crimp the tiny the ZH. The IWISS 3220M was decent, as was the SN-03, and they're totally viable, if slow, work with manual crimpers too. Use the 1 mm slot on the PAD11 or 1.2mm slot on the P707.
The finest pitch crimp connector JST makes. They make SMT headers only (most board houses can't put holes that close together anyway). I've never seen them in the wild in a piece of equipment, but have heard a surprising amount of talk about them among hobby and wouldbe entrepreneur types, and when you need a particularly dense wire to board connector, and you need to be able to make the cables yourself, this is... probably your best option. These take up the least board space for a given number of connections.
They work well enough, but my god, they are incredibly hard to crimp: They are just too small. The problem is holding them in place to position them in the crimp tool, more than anything else. Even a manual crimper with the necessary 0.7mm wide slot still means that you are trying to crimp something you need tweezers to hold onto. I have not been very successful;I cannot advise any course of action in which these are crimped on by hand. However, terminal line is readily available on marketplace sites for low prices (though be sure to compare the price per strand of given length to that of terminal line, considering minimum order quantities per color. For less than 100 pcs of any color terminal line, you're often better off buying cables, even with the wrong number of pins, using a razor to cut the retaining tabs, and then putting the wires into the desired housing in the correct order). Only the PA/PAD series and IWISS 2820 (a knockoff of the PA-09) are suitable manual crimpers, while the SN-03 ratchet crimp can be used
The GH line is a rather fancy set of connectors. SMT headers only, in vertical or horizontal versions, 1.25nn pitch. Totally different desigh, Where the others have the springy part in the terminal, and a pin in the receoptacle, the GH has a flat blade-like terminal that is inserted into the receptacle, engaging a mating connector on the top and bottom. These also have a LATCH - a real one - to ensure that they stay in even in high vibration environments. Unsurprisingly, they cost several times the price of other connectors. Use it when you need a fine pitch connector, but also worry about the connector retention due to vibration or other factors. These are widely used in drones, and some special purpose consumer electronics. While you need a smaller crimp tool than most, these are less brutally difficult to crimp than you'd expect - depending on the tool, they can be easier than ZH - because the flat blade is easier to hold onto. Since it's mostly flat, you don't need to worry about crushing it like you do the ZH and most others as you try to hold it in place with pliers, tweezers, or some hybrid gripping tool.
The so-called "Micro JST 1.25" connector looks like someone zapped a JST-ZH with a shrink-ray, except that the holes are squared off instead of rounded on the housing. That detail is often the fastest way to tell which is from the housings - the really do look very similar, and the size difference is not such that it's obvious. A more indepth examination will reveal other subtle differences. The SMT connectors, on the other hand, are very visibly different: where SMD ZH connectors are only 3mm longer than the number of pins times the pitch, on these they're about 6.5mm longer, and even considering that they're narrower, they still take up more total board area up to 6 pins. On the headers, notice that the male pins are wider in one dimension than the other, which is never the case for the JST wire-to-board connectors listed here. Available in wire to board and wire to wire, they are a viable option if you can stand crimping them. or can find terminal line off the right length. They are cheap and abundant, as terminal line, premade cables, or (ugh) tiny little terminals. Be sure you are comfortable with the amount of crimping of tiny terminals involved before you decide to start using these in a design. They are available with both SMT and through-hole headers. The former is recommended despite the oversided footprint. 1.25mm pitch is just a hair too tight for comfort, when working with a row of through-hole pins, and it's very easy to get solder bridges.
The really surprising thing about these "micro JST" connectors is that JST makes no such connector! On second thought, considering the differences listed above, maybe it's not so surprising. The ones sold under this name are made by some nameless Chinese manufacturer, and they get sold as "Micro JST" because anyone who looked at them briefly would be sure they were made by JST. In fact, the design appears suspiciously like a copy of Molex Picoblade.
These are wire-to-wire connectors. They feel cheap. They ARE cheap. Very cheap, actually. They're available up to at least 6p, though the 2p form is by far the most common, used to connect batteries in some consumer electronics where space is tight. Their claim to fame is that they are thin. 2.7mm or so for a pair of them connected - the side with the female pins has a slight ridge near the wire ebd which can be shaved off to get it to around 2.54mm (eg, 0.1") for passing through a narrow slot. They are thinner than any of the others here, which are at their smallest 3mm thick for the smaller of the halves, and 3.25mm for the mated wire-to-wire connector ("MicroJST" is the runner up), and these (claim) to carry 2A of current as well. Great for things where you are tightly constrained on connector thicknesss, and might have been tempted to use a DuPont conector for a long term connection just because they are thin. Don't do that. The dupont clone terminals are not reliable, the Mini-PV terminals are eye-wateringly expensive, and even with good terminals, they're not a very reliable connector, as they rely on spring force alone to keep them on. MX2.0 is better in this application; The plastic housings latch together - not much of a latch, but much better than nothing, which is what the dupont connectors have).
They are on the edge of the Tozzo 4228B, I wasn't very happy with results. Honestly, the PAD-11 felt like no slot was quite right. They crimp no problem in the IWS-3220M, though. just make sure it is positioned correctly: The biggest problem I had initially is that I would isert them too far towards the wire end into the crimp tool. I was getting decoyed by what looks like the tabs for the wire crimp, but is actually a structural part of the connector (both sides have it)..
These have a metal locking farb exposed through a hole in the housing, which can be pushed in with a pin extraction tool, similar to the mechanism used on the SM, VH, and XH connectors.
There exists an even thinner (and more expensive) version of these - unless you really really need it that thin, though, I can't recommend those.
I had a very disappointing initial experience crimping genuine molex terminals (with either IWS-3220 or PAD-11, depending on how difficult the wires involved were to crimp). They are harder to crimp well than typical JST connectors only in adverse scenarios - they otherwise crimp fine with IWS-3220 or PAD-11, etc. That wasn't the problem. It was getting them fully inserted into the genuine molex housing. When I finally got them inserted and locked in place, the connector seemed excellent, but they were far too difficult to use to do more than a couple of pins. However, I'd already ordered a batch of knockoffs from China, and I figured I'd give it a shot when they arrived in the mail a month later. Crimping was fine as expected - but they slipped into the housing with a satisfying click just fine. Unfortunately, after working with these for a while, I realized that these had the opposite problem, not holding the pins tightly and keeping them in proper alignment... and the polarizing notches were missing on the housing for the male pins, so you could flip the connectors around backwards. The second batch I got came baring the brand name "JMCONN", and worked without any hassles whatsoever. So: Molex-brand pins in Molex brand housings were nearly impossible to crimp and make fit in without extreme persuasion, clone terminals in cheap clone housings were too loose - and one of the housings wasn't polarized. Official terminals in clone housings also work.)
There exist crimpable inline splices (they're not really connectors - they're permanent, not detachable, but many of the same consideration apply. They are used for the same reason that crimp connectors are used - for quick application and the strain relief provided by the insulation crimp.
There are several styles available, some are longer, with an insulation crimp, apparently meant to potentially join more than 1 wire in each end. Others are shorter, with no insulation crimp, presumably meant to make butt joints easier. The ones without the insulation crimcan be challenging to find a suitable tool for I have 3 sizes, and my Hozan's largest slots can barely accomodate the middle one.
| Series | Width | TZ-4228B | SN-58B | SN-25 | IWS 3220 | SN-03B | PAD-11 | Hozan P707 | PA-09 | IWS-2820M |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tool Price | Wire/ | $20 | $20 max | $20 | $17-20 | $20 | $70 | $70-90 | $50-60 | $15-20 |
| Type | Insul. | Pliers | Pliers | Pliers | Anvil | Pliers | Manual | Manual | Manual | Manual |
| DuPont | 1.3/na | Yes, A | badly | Yes, A | badly, C | No | badly | *** A+ | Badly | Badly |
| Superseal | large | No | A+ | No | No | No | **** | A | No | No |
| JST-VH | 2.2/2.5 | A+ | A | No | No | No | A | B | Likely | |
| MicroFit3.0 | 1.3/1.6 | A | A^ | No | B | No | A+ | A | B | Likely |
| MX 2.0 | C | No | No | A+ | No | B | A | B | Likely | |
| JST-SM | 1.3/1.6 | A+ | A | No | B | No | A+ | A | A | Likely |
| JST-XH | 1.3/1.6 | A+ | A^ | No | A+ | No | A+ | A | A | Likely |
| JST-PH | 1.0/1.3 | A | C^ | No | A+ | No | A+ | A | A | Likely |
| JST-ZH | 0.9/1.1 | No | No | No | A+ | A | * A | A | *B | Likely |
| JST-GH | 0.7/1.0 | No | Mo | No | No | A | A | Hard | ** | Likely |
| JST-SH | 0.7/0.7 | No | No | No | No | * A | ** | No | ** | Likely |
| "MicroJST" | 0.7/1.0 | No | No | No | No | * A | * B | Hard | ** | Likely |
| Splices | by wire | No | Some | No | No | No | No | A | No | No |
| My Grade | A | B | C | B+ | C | A | A+ | B |
No - There is no slot that could plausuibly be used. All slots either too big or too small.
badly = indicates that there are no approopriate slots for this type of terminal. Inappropriate slots exist that the connector will physically fit into and which can be used to mangle the tabs in a manner somewhat similar to crimping. Unless a letter grade is noted, the result is not usable.
C - The results are barely usable, may be acceptable in a pinch for a small number of crimps.
B - Results are acceptable, but not great.
A - Good results
* - This connector is extremely challenging to hold and deal with due to it's size, and trying to use it with this tool was frustrating.
** - I have been unsuccessful using this tool due tothe difficulty of getting the small terminals aligned properly.
*** - note: Real MiniPV connectors require three crimps, not just 2 due to the length of the wire crimp. Generally real MiniPV pins crimp better (other than that wrinkle) in the Hozan while dupont pins from china do better in the Tozzo surprisingly.
**** - The PAD-11 with one of the larger dies should do these without problems, though it is still not an ideal tool. The SuperSeal connectors crimp very easily in a SN-58B.
^ - indicates that while the result is fine, there is additional challenge in positioning the wire the correct dept into the connector, because the die is significantly thicker than the connector. Care must be used that only the correct portion of the connector is inserted, as well.
Our recommended tool for typical hobby electronics applications, incuding DuPont and dupont connectors is the TZ-42278B
There are three general crimp tool styles. the "Plier" (ratchet pliers) style, which are the most common, are essentially pliers with precision shaped jaws for crimping instead of holding, and a ratchet mechanism to apply a consistent amount of force. They usually have a method to adjust the crimp force. Often nultiple sets of different jaws are available for one crimp tool. These will be incompatible with equivalent devices from other manufacturers, unfortunately. The ratchet does provide some measure of repeatability in terms of the pressure you apply (ie, if you've got them adjusted correctly, you won't overcrimp or undercrimp unless you change the wire gauge; this is usually fairly forgiving). The speed at which you can crimp connections depends on how long it takes you get the terminal into the tool with the wire inserted into it the correct distance. If you have to bend the tabs with pliers to hold the terminal onto the wire, that will slow you down significantly. If you have to "parallel" the crimp tabs, that will too. Try to avoid having to do that.
The Anvil style of ratchet crimop is less common, bringing the handles together forces the moving die away from the person holding it, where it engages a matching anvil. This mechanism is used by many of the official crimp tools - although the ones they use are far fancier and specialized than say, an IWS-3220. Less force is required to achieve the crimp compared to pliers. The IWS-3220 wins for smaller sizes largely because it's easier and faster to get terminal+wire positioned in, which is always the problem when crimping, which results from the thinner die than most plier type crimp tools.
The "manual" ones are non-ratcheting pliers, which only crimp one set of tabs at a time. You can use The two top dogs are the Hozan P-707 (which has a dupont insulation crimp die), and the Engineer PAD-11 (which has 3 die sets. Unfortunately, it has 6 sizes per die, and 12 total sizes, so if you can find the largest and smallest, the middle size becomes redundant - but almost everything relevant to hobby electronics is covered by the small die set - the most notable exception being that none of the die sets feature a slot for DuPont connectors - it is aimed squarely at JST connectors.) Both of these tools are in the $70-80 range. You crimp the wire crimp first, then you move the wire and terminal to a new slot in the die and crimp the insulation. Because of the extra step they are slower and more labor intensive compared to ratchet crimps. As you might expect, they also give you far more control, and can get good results under adverse conditions (wire with abnormal insulation thickness, multiple wires, pushing the limits of the size of wire, etc) when ratchet crimpers will either break the wires of fail to crimp. They also require more of a technique in terms of a "feel" for how tightly a given terminal should be crimped. It is striking how much more expensive they are compared to ratchet crimpers, which are a more complicated design, but they are built to a much higher standard of quality. The Hozan P-707 is known to do an excellent job on the round insulation crimp for dupont connectors, though it needs two actions to crimp the wide tabs of the wire crimp on actual mini PV connectors. I prefer the ratchet crimps for routine connections if a suitable one is available, as they make a tedious task faster. For more demanding tasks, such as when one needs to get several wires into one terminal, manual crimp tools give you the control needed to do a better job. Manual tools are also effective for "fixing" inadequately crimped terminals (going over the wire crimp of crap dupont line with a manual crimper - or something like an SN-25 or TZ-4228B - can make them less-bad); in cases where a ratchet crimper doesn't crimp one set of tabs well enough, crimping with the ratchet crimp and then going over them with a manual one can be faster than using a manual one from ths start.
The Hozan P707 holds a revered position among many hobbyists. It is hands down the best made manual crimper, and the only one that works for DuPont connectors (which it does an excellent job on - it's less notable for it's effeciveness with dupont connectors). Conductor crimp slots are available in 1.2, 1.4, 1.7, 2.0, 2.4, 2.9mm width B-shaped crimps. and 2.2m, diameter round, with insulator crimps of 1.4, 1.7, 2.0, 2.4, 2.9, 3.5, and 4.5, B-shaped, and 1.6mm round (for DuPont/dupont). It is very expensive, but it works very well and allows a great degree of control for adverse crimping scenarios/
The PA-09 is a slightly cheaper, worse version of the PAD-11 from the same manufacturer. It's not worth saving 10 bucks. The IWS-2820M is a knockoff of the PA-09 for a much lower price. It is not terrible and the consensus seems to be that it is an entirely usable manual crimper (I haven't used one yet) available for a price that makes it something other than a luxury tool.
Wow, that's a lot of crimp tools... Not really, though. The 48BS, 58, and 68 are all different names for the same thing. It has 4 slots in the jaws. The SN-28B and SN-48B hacve 3 slots each. Two of the slots on the two are the same. The official IWISS (originator of the SN-series naming scheme) product listing calls it an SN-58B; the other names are applied inconsistently by other manufacturers. There is no reason to own more than one of these, especially not an SN-28B or SN-48B. An SN58B is a good crimp tool to have though if you might crimp larger connectors.
This tool is comparable to the Tozzo for dupont/DuPont connectors. Unfortunately, that's the only connector i've seen that it's any good at. I don't know what the two larger slots are for, other than "something I've never seen".
You're probably going to need more than one crimp tool unless you're targeting one specific connector. The Tozzo is the most versatile ratchet crimper, and it covers 5 families of connector, including what are probably 4 of the most common - that is the closest it gets to an all-in-one ratchet crimp. Anything really large or smaller than PH needs another crimp tool. The manual ones are able to crimp a wider variety of terminals, but except for the IWISS one, are so expensive you could buy 3 ratchet crimps for the price, and only the most expensive one can do dupont terminals, which is what you likely care about most.
What about them? They crimp one kind of terminal. They generally do it extremely well, and many do everything except stripping and inserting the wire for you (and some even do that!) - you can crimp terminals faster and more easily than using generic tools. They also typically cost a few hundred dollars new for the poverty models ranging to over $1000 for the ones that you want. The ones for connectors popular with hobbyists are highly sought after on the secondary market (since no hobbyist can afford a new one). Some are prone to breakage when crimping knockoff terminals, especially if, like DuPont connectors, the knockoff terminals are very different from the original ones (For crimping "dupont" terminals, the official crimpers to look for are from Harwin, because the dupont terminals are a copy of Harwin's copy of DuPont connectors, not of the dupont connectors themselves.
You should be able to yank on the terminal without it coming off. If it comes off, you do not have a proper crimp. You need to tighten the crimp pressure on the crimp tool (if it's a ratchet crimp) or squeeze harder (if it's a mamual), use a different crimp tool or slot on the crimp tool. It may be that the wire you are using is thinner than you think it is (measure the strand diameter to 0.01mm count the number of strands, calculate the actual AWG of condudctor). The last problem can be mitigated by use of higher quality; I use FEP wire for anything that I care about the exact gauge of the wire, or calculate it from the number of strands and their diameter given by vendor (if given) - they often do the conversion wrong.
You positioned the terminal too close to the tip when crimping. Make sure the edge of the latch is not within the crimp tool. Most common with JST-XH and others that us a similar mechanism.
The terminal was not aligned correctly when crimped, or an inappropriate crimp tool or slot was used, and/or the terminal was positioned incorrectly (too far in or too far out) Most crimping tools only work with the wire end on one side, and will mangle the crimp if done backwards. It's obvious which way to use a ratchet crimp, but the PAD11 also has this issue.
Yup, they are. Use real DuPont connectors or any other type of connector listed here. The cheapest dupont terminal that is fit for purpose is the half gold kind (the most expensive chinese knockoff), and dupont terminal line must not be made from ribbon cable; the ribbon cable kind is terrible - my guess is the wire is 2-4 AWG too thin, and would be undercrimped even if it wasnt.
Use real DuPont connectors, or consider the connectors disposable and be prepared to cut, strip, and recrimp (I find this a particular issue on UPDI prgrammers. -)
Periodically you will have pins in a housing that you want to remove from that housing. Whether you're recycling terminal line from a different design, are adapting the design to accomodate a different number of pins, or you just put them in in the wrong order, this is a normal thing to do. This is easiest to do with the locking tab, and as an added benefit, except in the case of dupont connectors, both the housing and terminals can almost always be reused (dupont housings are easy to damage). If you are mass-extracting pins, these type of connectors can be disassembled by pressing a razor against the base of the lockign tabs, cutting them off, and then pulling the wires free (why would you ever do that? Because unless you want 100 pcs per color, and sometimes even if you do, it's the cheapest way to get terminal line!) When there is an exposed metal farb that can be pushed in, this is also not hard to do (push the wire + terminal in further, and then use the extraction tool) - but in this case, the terminal may not latch in the next housing. Sometimes you can "restore" these farbs, at least a couple of times (try to get the edge of an X=Acto knife or razor under the farb) and bend them back into position. This can be done only a couple of times on a given terminal.
The hardest case is when it is a non-exposed metal farb that you have to act on. JST-SM and XH male connectors have this, In the case of SM, you need to push the pin inwards and then insert the pin extraction tool into the hole on the opposite side, and then pull out the terminal. That would be the hole that is an extension of the one the pin is coming out of, on the side closest to the latch (not the much larger holes on the side opposite the latch, those are apparently just for looks). Usually if you press the tool in enough, you will feel it push the connector out. Pulling the wirewithout doing this will usually break the farb - or at least render it unusable. For the JST-XH male connectors, there is a slot on the end where the wire is inserted, through which you can see the metal farb: Push the wire + terminal inwards, insert pin extraction tool at an angle such that it holds the farb down, and remove the wire. for large JST-XH connectors, you can use the points of pin header to press in the latches.
Actually, no, that's not the hardest case, just an annoying one. The hardest cases are the TE SuperSeal with the male pins, and the MX 3.0. Those are often damned near impossible to remove (I've studied the diagram carefully, used a wide variety of tools, and consistently had a truly dismal rate of maintaining the integrity of both the terminal and housing for the Superseals, and with the MX 3.0, I don't even bother trying, because i am likely to ruin both. And the superseals are hard even with the red plastic latch part fully removed during depinning. The only time MX3.0 connectors come out is when you don't want them to, and SuperSeal connectors require consideerable effort, especially igf you want both housing and terminal to survive.
As noted above, DuPont used to make connectors, decades ago. That division became Berg, and several decades of spin-off's, mergers, acquisions and the like have left the production of the real ones in the hands of connector giant Amphenol, while DuPont has focused on other product areas. For a time, a completely different housing style was used: A colorful plastic housing with a hinge in the middle. You would put the pins into the lower half of the housing, rotate them all to face forward, and then flip the back part up, where it would clip onto the terminals, These were made in allthe colors of the rainbow, and lengths of at least 12 pins, and each position had a number molded into the plastic. Another major connector manufacturer, at some point still several decades back looked at the MiniPV connector with covetous eyes - but aside from any legal impediemnts (which might not have expired at that time), the MiniPV connectors were an expensive terminal to manufacture. There's an actual leaf spring in there, made out of an alloy actually suited for making springs. Two metals, all these little leaf springs, and the larger part intricately folded to hold the spring in place. No wonder DuPont charged so much for them. Couldn't they come up with something that could be stamped and would fit the same kind of pin header? Well, that's what they did, and they could quote the same headline specs, (unless you consider durability to be a headline spec). That was the Harwin M20 connector series.
So about that durability - without the spring, it's just the "springiness" of the connector itself holding the pins on, and the housing has no mechanism to hold them on either. Unsurprisingly the M20's didn't hold up as well: the connector deforms and doesn't make as reliable of a connection over time. How much less durable are they? The specifications from Amphenol vs Harwin aren't directly comparable. Amphenol's specs describe testing 15u gold plated contacts in a corrosive environment after subjecting them to 1000 cycles of mating/unmating. Harwin specs 300 cycles for their gold plated ones, and just 50 for the non-gold-plated ones. There is no environmental challenge described. I would be surprised if mating cycles were specified for the common clones (were you able to get a spec sheet and knew chinese so you could read it), and even more surprised if they did anything other than copy Harwin datasheet. We all know that they're pretty much crap.
Subsequently, chinese manufacturers picked up the design, which was becoming very popular for hobby electronics - and true to form, tried to see how they could cheap out just a little more. The metal got thinner, the wire crimp got shorter, and reliability suffered further. However, these connectors continued to be called "dupont connectors". Why? Likely because the only tools that did a decent job crimping them were emblazoned with the DuPont name, having been made decades ago, used until the company offshored their manufacturing and sold the tools into the secondary market (no hobbyist would pay the prices AMP or even Harwin wants for crimp tools new), and with no new production cheap tools designed to crimp them available until the past few years, well, what would you call the nameless (the chinese knockoff terminals are generally sold online with no part numbers, naturally) yet ubiquitous connector that was crimped with a tool that said "DuPont"?
You've got to feel a little bad for DuPont (or you would if they hadn't spent the ensuing decades afer selling their connector business as one of the biggest manufactuters of contaminated groundwater, persitant pollutants, and environmental liability lawsuits), as these "dupont" connectors have a reputation every bit as bad as they deserve - (recently, when I discovered s batch of jumpers that was failing the pull test, the next time a friend of mine who happenes to work in the electronics industry stopped by, I said "You know dupont connectors rig--" and he cut me off: "I hate them!" I think he used a bad word in there somewhere, too). My point is, they got the bad reputation from a cheap knockoff of a cheap knockoff of a connector they started selling something like 50 years ago.
Not all terminals are equally difficult to crimp, though in general they get harder as the terminal gets smaller, since your manual dexterity, visual acuity, and the size of your fingertips is constant. When you are planning a project, be sure to verify that you really are able to crimp a size of connector as easily as you hope, before you buy all the parts, and discover that you can't make the connectors you thought you could after all. Oops. Everything from JST-PH on up is easy to crimp (The TZ-4228B does it no problem, as do many other tools).
The MX style has a latch on the housing. You might assume the terminals themselves are interchangible. They're not. MX housings only take MX terminals, and non-MX housings only take non-MX terminals,
Be careful with JST-GH and "micro JST" connectors - I have seen the latter sold as the former (the seller appeared very confused when I told him that micro JST is not the same thing as JST GH - and if you look on JST's website, yeah, JST-GH is the only 1.25mm pitch wire to board connector with crimp terminals they make... it would appear that the seller had done that, and concluded that's what they were selling, even though JST-GH looks nothing like "micro JST")
You can get all of these terminals pre-crimped onto wires. Sometimes sold as "terminal line" (that's a good search term). The only type of connector where poorly crimped terminal line is common is the "dupont" type as I described above, and decent (ie, with the best kind of clone terminals, but without the gold plate option) dupont terminal line is available (most of the stuff that isn't made with ribbon cable is fine). Needless to say,terminal line made with real MiniPV terminals is not available from the usual suspects. I've yet to encounter a bad batch of JST terminal line, whereas I'd been building electronics for years before I encountered dupont line that wasn't crap. Precrimped cables, where the terminals are inserted into a housing already, of all types seems to be a bit less consistent in quality, Terminal line is very common for the JST Wire to board connectors (the male JST-XH is rarely seen on terminal line, and the male PH is unheardof, though you can buy cables and remove the housings). The one exception to the "JST precrimped cables are usually decent" trend is JST-SM - bad JST-SM pre-crimped connectors are almost ubiquitous!
These are sold in abundance because of their use for LED striops. Some of these are fine, and can be a time saver (or, really more of a "time wpent getting comfortable crimping connectors" saver - JST-SM is probably the easiest of the connectors listed here to crimp) - but make sure you get ones with the wire gauge listed, and measure it to be sure when you get it. I have seen 30 gauge wire stamped "AWG 22" - and when such wires were used without recognizing that, seen the red insulation baked by the heat generated by the undersized wire until the red and black wires were the same color.
The same holds for any pre-wired connector, but the JST-SM series seem to be the worst-afflicted by this sort of cheaping-out, likely because of the mass market for LED strip - unfortunately, LED strips do tend to be a demanding application. Those things draw a lot of current. Very few people try to put a full 3A through a dupont connector, but people try to put more than that through a JST-SM connectors ALL THE TIME, often with no idea that they're doing anything wrong. Wiring up a very short strip of addressable LEDs is easy, and people new to electronics see how easy it is, and scale their projects without realizing that the handling the power supply very quickly becomes the dominant technical problem.
Provided you crimp with a manual crimp tool (a ratchet crimp is a non-starter here - it will apply too much force and break off the wires) you can stuff multiple wires into one terminal, crimp it down, and have a decent chance of it working! This is often not the ideal approach, but it can work. Some terminals are even designed specifically for it (real DuPont for example, specifies the thickness of 2 wires that could be used).
Unless you are very good with wire strippers, and enjoy stripping large numbers of wires without nicking the conductors, I would recommend getting a thermal wire strippeR. In general, but particularly if you are gonna be crimping a lot of connectors. I have a PTS-10 from Patco ($80 - it's not a chinese brand; that's their entry level option). It consists of a transformer in a plastic housing that puts about 3w through a metal "blade" (which is thin but not sharpened, with a tapered slot into which the wire is inserted and rotated between your fingers.. I usually leave mine plugged in, (they get hot enough to hurt, but not really hot enough to burn you). The advantage is that you will never nick the wires, and the wire is stripped cleanly and consistently (unless it's PTFE insulated, but that stuff is dreadful to work with. FEP insulation can even be strioped, albeit less pleasantly (I have to piush both sides of the wire towards the narrow end) BUT IT DOES WORK!!!. It makes a real difference in how fast you can wire things up in general and is particularly helpful with crimp connectors where a smooth flat cut to the insulation is needed, and repeatability is king. In general, you just don't realize how time consuming it is to strip wires until you get a thermal wire stripper...\
I have spoken to a number of people who, having decided crimping is too hard, advocate instead just soldering the wires to the terminals. Don't do this. This will defeat the purpose of the insulation crimp and introduce a weak point in wire right at it's point of highest stress. The solder will wick up between the strands, typically going a little bit beyond where the insulation crimp would be, and then solidify. Now there is a an interface between a rigid and flexible portion of the wire. And it is right outside the connector, which experiences more bending than any other part of the wire. Of course, if the wire will not be bending here, that might be okay but in typical hobby applications, where you will be unplugging and plugging in connectors during the build process, the wire is highly likely to break off there. This is also why, whenever you just tack a wire onto a PCB, it seems so damned easy to break a wire off handling the board. In many low cost consumer electronics, there are things that look like connector housings on a PCB, but there's no actual connector - the wires are just soldered to the board. These are there to act as strain relief only. For the same reason you should not solder a terminal you have also crimped on either.
One time that I do use solder and crimp terminals together? Permanently affixing dupont clone terminals to the pins they mate with. Take the housing, and cut off the first couple of mm so that a connector can be pushed in normally, but will continue through, you can thus put the housings on from the back instead of the front. If the other end of the wires has something crimped onto it already, feed the housing over the terminals (remember you'll need to unlatch them). Now, get out your 138C low temp solder (which will likely be in paste form - bismuth wire solder is still pretty exotic). For the paste, you want a blob on each male pin and on a bit on each female terminal. Put terminals onto the pins - you want them on as far as they normally go (which is all the way, minus the couple mm you cut off the housing). Make sure before soldering each one, making sure that they are all in the same orientation and that it matches what the housing will need. With your iron set to a low temperature, or with hot air, you can solder the terminals onto the pins without destroying the insulation crimp. Don't use excessive amounts of solder, since you want to be able to slide the housing over it at the end. Finally, slide the housing down the wires - ideally it should snap into place like normal. . Using even leaded solder will get the terminal and wire too hot, softening the insulation and ruining the insulation crimp andh hence the strain relief. You must work quickly and limit the time that solder is liquid for. If you let the solder wick up the wire, you've defeated the point of this operation, which is to get the strain relief of the wire crimp, without relying on the unreliable knockoff connectors making a decent connection. Shrink tube and be usedin place of the housing (use the kind with "thick glue" for best results).
At the start and end of any operation involving bismuth solder, if you normally use leaded solder, wipe off excess solder and then "wash" the tip of the iron with some normal unleaded (Sn 96.5+) solder! Even few wt% lead contamination in bismuth solder with >14% bismuth will lead to a phase with a melting point under 100C forming. Not a lot of it, but you don't need much to adversely impact the physical properties of the solder at only mildly elevated temperatures. Do the same thing afterwards.