The connecting cable

The connecting cable has several issues. Applying the pins to flexible 6 conductor Telco style wire results in a cable that has a high failure rate. The stranded wire is simply so fragile that a small nick while stripping caused some of the strands to break off making the connection more fragile. I wound up using a fairly expensive stripping tool to avoid nicking the conductors. This fixed that problem.

The socket pins are tiny and difficult to apply to the wire with my large hands, I should probably find a 6 to 10 year old to work with them - on second thought maybe a 14 year old would be better because they could do the crimping as well. I initially was soldering them on but that makes the wire more likely to fracture when installing it in the field and one bad wire makes the board not function properly. So I bought a special crimping tool to apply the pins to the cable. The small gauge wire turns out not to have the strength to resist the handling forces when the cable is tugged on. I found that folding the conductors over the sheath and then crimping improved that situation but I still have too many fails making the cables.

I am still trying different wire to improve the durability of the cable. My latest attempt is a wire of a larger gauge but the flexibility is now somewhat of an issue. The wire has to be long enough to be able to come out of the head a few inches but needs to be short enough to not have a lot of surplus that needs to be in the base box.