Cross-wired Uart Ports between two Pine Boards via Cat5 Cable

[MarkHaysHarris777]

pfeerick pointed out (on a recent PM) that I should make a note here about the nature of Cat5 and Cat6 cables in terms of their construction.

... many Cat5 cables (and most Cat6 cables) do not have solid core copper wires; rather, they have 24 AWG braided core copper wires-- which makes them good !

Unfortunately, it makes working with the individual wires in an experiment like the one in this post difficult, often; which requires good soldering skills. 

The trick is tinning the wires; which means, after stripping away the plastic coating of each wire we need to carefully twist tightly the braided core underneith, and then we need to coat the twisted wire with solder to hold the wrap together... this so that the solder tends to run up under the plastic wrap !  If you've never done this before, it can be a pain in the neck (just a friendly warning, but not intended to scare anyone off).

The next step is to tin the tips of the male header pins, and the final step is to 'tack' solder the tinned cable  wires to the bottom tips of the male header pins (see the pics above).

By the way, this of course does 'waste' a perfectly good Cat5 cable !  

So, I will add the cable does not have to be one of your best cables, in fact if you have an old cable perhaps with damaged end plugs (bad RJ45 plug) use that cable. Then add this modified cable to your collection of debuging tools for use with your Pine boards and PI boards. It also works very well indeed with your Arduino boards too.