Jumpers and electrical pins - areas of application
A jumper is an element commonly used in electronics, also known by its English name - jumper. A jumper is nothing more than miniature metal female plugs connected together. From the point of view of the electrical circuit, they constitute a short circuit. The most common and standardized type of jumper is a two-pin jumper with a pin pitch of 2.54 mm, in which the metal plugs are covered with plastic on the outside, ensuring insulation of the jumper from the surrounding electronic components. Everyone who has assembled a desktop computer at least once, when starting it for the first time, selected the appropriate configuration, e.g. on the motherboard or in the hard drive connected to it using jumpers. Placing a jumper on the electrical pins, i.e. closing the electrical circuit, activates certain functionalities, such as determining the processor clock frequency or the supply voltage value. Jumpers are often used to reset the configuration of the electronic system, restoring it to factory settings, where, for example, using a button instead could cause this process unintentionally and in a manner unintended by the user.
Jumper versus plug and play
Trends in consumer electronics, especially in the area of computers and their accessories, are developing towards the use of solutions that have been with us for a long time, and we are talking about plug and play. Software auto-configuration capabilities of devices make their operation easier for the user. On the other hand, many specialists still use jumpers and electrical pins due to the greater resistance of hardware configurations than software. An error unforeseen by the programmer may occur in the program, while the jumper provides a clear choice in the configuration, and we do not need a keyboard or display to change it.
Jumper types
Even though a jumper is a very simple electronic element, its versatile use in electronic systems has resulted in the appearance of jumpers in various colors on the market, which facilitates their identification or division of functions in a given electronic system. There are also jumpers with an elongated housing that facilitates their use, e.g. without the use of forceps or tweezers.