Monthly Archives: November 2015

Anderson Power Pole & PCB Mount

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Lately I have been doing more designs that involve high power, usually right around a kilowatt at 30A – 40A. Moving that much power takes a bit of effort in connector selection.

I have been using Anderson Power Pole connectors because they work up to the 45A-55A range with not too much heating and are somewhat cheap (as in only a dollar per housing and pin). They also have a PCB mounting contact that is handy.

The PCB mount contact comes in two versions, 45 amp (1335G1/1336G1/1337G1) and 25 amp (1317G2 / 1317G12 etc). Which is great, except the two pins are mounted 180deg relative to each other.

Welp >.< . Which makes it easy to look at the wrong picture in the catalog and design a board that is inverted. Remember, 45A are hood down, 25A is hood up. This actually makes sense, with the hood down, there is a little more room for airflow around the housing, which is part of the higher current rating, I assume.

New Domain, SSL

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I managed to get my hands on a shiny new .io domain, which makes me rather happy. The old domain should automatically redirect to the new one mostly transparently, and probably will for at least another year.

However, the main upgrade is actually a real, live, root trusted SSL cert, free from the Let’s Encrypt project. Thanks, by the way… All connections should now take place over a TLS 1.2 connection with AES-GCM crypto and ECDHE_RSA kex if your browser supports it.

Installation was rather painless, and is much easier if you generate the key on the same machine as is running the live website, as it spins up a server (or plugs into apache) to communicate with the certificate issuing server in order to validate that I actually control the DNS information for the domain.

Next steps are probably hosting my own DNS so I can turn on DNSSEC and all the related security enhancements like DANE. And maybe writing a few posts about some electronics.