Using the Screw Terminal Wildcard

The Screw Terminal Wildcard^TM simplifies connecting to the field signals of other WildCards. It provides a screw terminal connection for each of the pins on its 24-pin field header. This wildcard is perfect for data acquisition, control and instrumentation applications when you need to make connections to bare wire sensors. The Wildcard contains two 24-pin headers:

Header H5 is a pass-through header that conveys the Wildcard bus from the bottom of the board to the top. Its signals are not used by the Wildcard. It is provided only so that the Screw Terminal Wildcard may be mounted on a controller or stack of Wildcards and enable the mounting of more Wildcards above it.
Header H1 is its field header. You ribbon cable from this header to the field header of any other Wildcard. Each of its signals is brought to the screw terminals on the top of the board. The screw terminals are provided in groups of eight on terminal headers H2, H3 and H4.

Using it is simple, you connect the field header of the Screw Terminal Wildcard to the field header of the Wildcard whose signals to which you want screw terminal access. Connect the field connectors together using a 24 conductor ribbon cable, making sure that pin-1 on one header is connected to pin-1 on the other. The pin-1 wire is distinguished as the red marker wire.

You can either mount the Screw Terminal Wildcard onto a instrument controller board or Wildcard, or you can mount it elsewhere and connect only to its field header. The other header, H5, does not need to be connected for it to work. The Screw Terminal Wildcard does not use any of the signals from the Wildcard bus, thus it does not count as one of the eight Wildcard addresses allowed. The Wildcard bus header is present only to allow other modules to stack on top of the Screw Terminal Wildcard if desired.

You should connect and configure the Wildcard whose field signals you are using as described in its users guide.

Once you have connected the Screw Terminal Module correctly, you can now start connecting wires to the field bus and screw terminal blocks.

The following photo shows the Screw Terminal Wildcard mounted onto a PDQ Board, which is itself mounted onto a Docking Panel.

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The following photo shows the Screw Terminal Wildcard used with a QCard Controller, and connected only by a ribbon cable. The screw terminals provide easy connection to each of the signals of the QCard's field signals.

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Physical Specifications
Weight:	33 gram
Size :	2" x 2.5" x 0.375"¹⁾ (50.8mm x 63.5mm x 9.5mm)

Current rating

The current rating of the Screw Terminal Wildcard is 2 amp and 300 VDC (limited by the 24-pin IDC socket connected to its field header). Be careful not to confuse the current and voltage rating of the Screw Terminal Wildcard with the current and voltage limits of the Wildcard you are connecting to.

Notes:

Height is from the bottom of the PCB to the top of the tallest component on the top side of the PCB.

This page is about: Screw Terminals, Simple Connections to Wires – The Screw Terminal Wildcard simplifies connecting to the field signals of other WildCards. It provides a screw terminal connection for each of the pins on its 24-pin field header. This wildcard is perfect for data acquisition, control and instrumentation applications when you need to make connections to bare wire sensors.