Dupont connectors — the little doohickeys at the end of jumper wires — are great if you never have to build them yourself. You’ll probably attempt it once with the wrong tools, and while the scars are healing you’ll vow never to do it again.
I recently bought a cheap crimp kit to build the MidTBot ESP32 plotter. My first attempts were, one might say, crap. But I wanted to clean up some of the cables from my desk, and one of them was a horrible taped-together set of jumper wires to use with a ST-LINK V2 compatible In-Circuit Programmer. Surely I could do better than my first try?
I did — thanks to this Instructable: Make a Good Dupont Pin-Crimp EVERY TIME!. Yes, it’s very long. Yes, it’s all about the only way to do it. Curiously, though, it’s actually right: I got all 8 connectors made while only wasting one.
The absolutely golden detail that improved my success was making the connector jig out of a little bit of pin header. This made the process mostly repeatable and quite a bit faster. And the guide has some really helpful failure matrices:
I wouldn’t go out of my way to make Dupont connectors now — they’re still fiddly and slow — but now I have the tools, parts and skills to make less of a mess of them.