eyrieowl: Thanks! Lots of fun to make

kyle: Not Paul in the picture. :-) Unfortunately large quantities of beer does not make for a sexy waistline. The sacrifices I make….

Hue Mann: Definatley not good for any type of baggage. We had it driven down with some folks.

jesus in techicolour, pepe prawn: Only in the privacy if my own home.

Taylor Alexander, error404, hacknet: For a proof of concept, no funding for a one off device, $50 for a connector seems a bit extreme. It is only intended to deliver 18V to trip a solenoid for a fraction of a second. It is what I had on hand short notice, fit in the right space, and fit with the theme of “Hacking Home Depot”

For something cheaper check out military style connectors. They don’t have the same signal integrity but for power it doesn’t matter, and they are good and robust.

In fact, hackaday, you should do a hackit post on connectors, so people stop using cheap brittle ethernet jacks for everything!

Hell, in my industry, we carry millivolt level signals through connectors to a high quality a2d to read strain gauges – so signal integrity is a big deal – and we only use LEMO connectors for that, but some competitors use ethernet! You can’t that a connector meant for digital signals and expect it to work for millivolt analog signals! a digital circuit doesn’t care if it gets 5 volt logic or 3.9 volt logic usually, so even a couple ohms of resistance would be tolerable, but in millivolt signals this *ABSOLUTLEY* isn’t true! Gah, it bothers me so much when i see the cheap stuff our competitors use! Grr.
/Rant
-Taylor