One thing I’ve always found annoying when working with DB9s is that the staggered pins makes them incompatible with matrix board.  The simplest solution has always been to just put the DB9 on the end of a cable, and either solder the cable directly to the board, or use a box header, which has parallel rows of pins.

A few days ago I was hit with a flash of inspiration – and now I can’t believe I didn’t think of this solution sooner!

Ingredients:

• 1 DB9 solder-bucket connector
• 1 length of 2-row right-angle pin header

Method:

• Cut a 5×2 block of pin header, and carefully bend one row of pins, so that they end up staggered.

• With a bit of gentle persuasion they can now be made to fit into the solder buckets.  The spare pin can be extracted fairly easily with pliers, especially if you heat the pin first with the soldering iron.

Since I hit on this idea *after* I’d started building a joystick adapter board for the C3 FPGA board, I had to change the plans on the fly, so the finished article is anything but neat!

It does work, however: