Tutorial – Extending your Grove Cables
Our Smart Garden System Customers (for longer moisture sensor cables) and ThunderBoard Lightning Detector customers (to get away from pesky EMI) have been asking for longer than 50cm Grove cables.
Here is our Grove Cable Extender kit for these issues. These can be used with Arduino, ESP32, ESP8266 and Raspberry Pi systems.
We are pleased to announce that we now have a Grove Extender Cable system available. You can buy them here.
These two boards are to allow you to extend grove cables to whatever length you need. You can use RJ11 or RJ45 connectors.
This pair of connectors DO NOT COME WITH A CABLE. You will need to build your own.
RJ11 cables are often called “Phone Cables” but you need to make sure your pre-made cable is a “straight through – Extension” cable and not a “reversed cable”.
A reversed cable looks like this:
To get the right length for your project, we suggest building your own cables.
Building Your Own Cables
Here are our suggestions.
For Pre-assembled cables:
Pre Made 7 foot cables (10 Pack) Straight Wiring
Build Your own tool set:
25 foot Telephone Cord – (this is for raw materials)
Note On Cable Lengths
In general, 5V lines will go further than 3.3V lines.
Data Cables
For Data cables, anything under 10 feet should work. The longer the cable, the higher resistance and more noise on the cable. Try the length you need and test it by running your sensing software.
Analog Cables
For Analog cables, anything under 10 feet should work. The longer the cable, the higher resistance and more noise on the cable. Try the length you need and test it by running your sensing software.
Serial Cables
For Serial cables, 10 feet is a good limit. You need to test your system and make sure the serial data is coming through OK.
I2C Cables
10 Feet should work well, but it depends on your pullups on the data (SDA) and Serial Clock line (SCL). You can go further (depending on your noise environment) but you will have to put lower resistance pullups (stronger pullups) on your SDA and SCL lines. 1K Ohm is a good value to start with on long calbes.
There are two locations on the Grove extender Board to put resistors. Only put them on the far end of the cable.