3.5mm Audio Cable to Breadboard Adapter

Part of being a maker is making your own tools – jigs, templates, adapters – either because the tools you can purchase are beyond your budget or because they doesn't suit your needs well enough. And in some cases, just like mine, a commercial product may not even exist.

In this instructable I'll show you how I made a simple adapter cable that lets me take audio from a 3.5mm jack and input that signal straight into a breadboard or an amp board with pin headers. Making it should take you no more than 30 minutes, and the parts required might be in your scraps bin already. 

Here's what you'll need to make this project:

• A 3.5mm audio plug with cable – I salvaged mine from a broken old pair of speakers. 
• 3x Jumper wires with male to female pin headers – I've seen these in hobby electronics stores. They come in pretty ribbons. You can also get them from China cheaply. Shopping Link
• Heat shrink tubing or electrical tape. Shopping Link
• Soldering iron and solder
• Third hand tool (optional)
• Wire stripper

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I started by removing about 2-3 centimeters of insulation from the end of the audio cable. Inside such cables you're likely to find two wires with their own insulation – white for the left and red for the right channel. They're going to be surrounded by the ground wire. 

The loose strands of ground wire I twisted together. I also removed about 1cm of insulation from the white and red wires and twisted those, as seen in the second picture here. (Pro tip: do your wire twisting with clean hands. Skin oil or dirt will make it harder for solder to stick to the wire. Using gloves or tools for this is also a good idea.)

Next I cut the three jumper wires in half. Each pair will be soldered to the audio cable in a bit.

Keep in mind that you don't have to use both the male and the female connectors. If you're going to use the adapter only with a breadboard, you can use only the wires with male pin headers.

I should also point out that the colors weren't chosen at random. It is common to use a black wire for ground, a white one for the left audio channel, and a right one for the right channel.

Now is the time to put heat shrink tubing on your jumper wires (you usually can't do this after the wires have been soldered :)

The 3.5mm cable pictured here has two sizes of tubing because I wasn't sure which size was going to fit better. (The smaller, yellow one worked out fine.)

Now solder the jumper wires to the corresponding wires from the audio cable: white to white, red to red, and black to ground. A third hand tool will be of great help for this step.

To shrink the heat shrink tubing, I used an ordinary lighter. First I insulated the smaller, individual wire groups, then I put on a larger, longer piece of heat shrink over all wires.

And just like that, my audio adapter cable is complete and functional.

Thank you for reading this simple guide. As usual, if you have any questions about anything described here, I'd be happy to answer them.

By the way, you can check out my YouTube channel where I post project build videos and tutorials. You can also follow me on Instagram where I post projects I'm working on and bits of inspiration.