Lindsay lets us know about a problem he ran into with cheap female pinheaders:
I once had problems with a 0.1″ pin header connector – the sockets inside the female connector made extremely poor contact. It was for an LCD display and only about half of the pins were connected! Swapped it for a different style of connector and it worked fine.
Via the comments.
picture on his website and in cv tells me that “she” is not she :)
Fixed, thanks.
Sorry about the mess-up
I would have guessed that the tuning fork-variant was the inferior version. They don’t connect reliably with those Chinese breadboard jumper wires.
Yes, I initially thought that as well – surely four points of contact would be better than two. But half of the four points of contact weren’t actually making contact ;-)
In addition, the plastic housing of the “tuning fork” connector is much better – seems to be glass-filled nylon, whereas the cheapo one is an unfilled polythene. Yeah, hardly a big deal, but it just feels more solid. The legs don’t get bent as easily either.