6 Pin XH Cable - 50mm length

A 50 mm jumper with a white 6-pin JST XH connector on each end and black wires in between. That’s Blue Alpine part E00110-00, $1.99. Short cables like this are cheap, and they’re easy to damage by pulling on the wires instead of the housing.

About the JST XH connector

XH is a connector series from JST, the Japanese connector maker, and it’s become one of the common wire-to-board formats in small electronics. A plastic housing on the cable holds crimped metal contacts. That housing plugs onto a row of pins, called a header, soldered to a circuit board. The pins sit 2.5 mm apart center to center. That spacing is the pitch.

The housings are polarized, meaning the housing and header are shaped so they only fit together one way. If a JST XH connector won’t seat, don’t push harder. Turn it around and look again. The JST connector article covers XH alongside the company’s other series.

Checking pitch and pin count

• Count the pins on your old cable’s housing. Each JST XH connector on this one has six.
• Measure across them. On a 6-pin XH, the outer two pins are 12.5 mm apart center to center (five gaps of 2.5 mm).
• Check the housing color. These are white.
• Measure the cable. The listed length here is 50 mm.

Pitch is the detail people miss. Plenty of hobby cables use 0.1 in (2.54 mm) spacing, and JST’s own PH series is 2.0 mm. In a photo they all look much alike. A housing at the wrong pitch may press on partway and make poor contact on the end pins. A pair of calipers settles it in seconds.

Pin order on a jumper

All six wires are black, so you can’t trace them by color. On a straight jumper, the wire in position 1 at one end lands in position 1 at the other, but some cables are built reversed. Lay your old one flat beside our photos and compare how the two housings are turned relative to each other. If yours looks crossed over, ask before ordering. Pin 1 is often marked on the board next to the header.

Unplugging and fitting a JST XH connector cable

Unplug the machine first. Before you touch any board, touch a grounded metal surface to bleed off static, and handle boards by their edges.

Grip each JST XH connector by its housing and ease it off the header, rocking it gently side to side. Don’t pull on the wires. The crimped contacts can slide back out of the housing, and then the plug looks fine while one circuit is dead. That’s an annoying fault to chase.

To fit the new cable, line up the polarizing shape, press the housing straight down until it’s fully seated, and check that no bare pin shows between housing and header. At 50 mm there’s no slack to play with, so route it exactly the way the old one ran.

Why the length matters

Fifty millimeters is about two inches. That’s short, and short jumpers are usually short for a reason. A longer cable leaves a loop that can snag or rub on something. A shorter one won’t reach, or it pulls sideways on both headers. If your old jumper measures noticeably more or less than 50 mm, this probably isn’t the right part, so check with us.

When to replace rather than reseat

Reseating fixes a loose JST XH connector. It won’t fix a wire that’s cracked at the crimp, a housing with a broken side, or a contact that has backed out. At $1.99, swapping the whole jumper beats repairing one.

Need a different kind of cable? The Molex cable and the rest of our electronics spares are listed by part number. If your manual shows something other than E00110-00, send us a message with a photo of the old cable next to a ruler.