I want to build a custom connector to attach to the PICKIT3 serial pins. I have the black plastic bit and little metal bits (similar to the picture below), and wire.
Out of these components, I would like to build a connector with a small piece of wire sticking out for every hole from the black plastic bit.
What are the steps to assemble the connector? What tools I should use?
First, let's use the right terminology.
The "black plastic bit" is referred to as the housing; the "little metal bits" are the contacts: in this case sockets. The ones in the picture, as SomeHardwareGuy inferred, are crimp type (as opposed to solder cup) contacts. They should be crimped with an appropriate crimping tool.
The tool in the photo is barely adequate and may do an acceptable job if the connector won't be used for anything critical. Do not use pliers! A good quality crimp requires very high pressure applied at the right point of the contact and pliers simply won't do that. A crimper recommended by most manufacturers is unfortunately, rather expensive. The cheapest good one I know of is the ProCrimper from TE Connectivity (formerly Tyco). It costs around $200 but does an amazing job and is well worth the money if you do a lot of crimped connections. This is a Molex page that explains what it takes to make a good crimp. The full document can be found here
There is a fairly low cost crimping tool being sold by a bunch of hobby outlets for anywhere from $20 to $40. I bought this one
from Hansen Hobbies. It does an acceptable job and is far superior to the one in the other answer, and costs a lot less than the ProCrimper shown here
Get yourself a stripper / crimp tool like this:
Get the right size wire (stranded would be best) and strip a little off of one end. Then see the middle part, it helps you crimp those little metal pieces around the wire you just stripped.
After you strip the wire you should be able to insert the new wire plus pin through the back of that plastic connector and it should latch in.
Now if you don't have a stripper / crimper you could just use some wire cutters to do the stripping and then smash the crimp with pliers but the crimp tool works better and is reasonably cheap.
