I have some current sensors that I need to mount close to the batteries on my boat whose current they are monitoring with the display and electronics quite some way away at the helm.
The obvious approach is to mount the sensors on a little bit of veroboard or similar (their pins are 0.1" pitch) and then to run some cable from there to the electronics. In addition it would be nice to be able to disconnect the cable easily for installation etc.
I need 8 wires from sensor to electronics so the obvious cable to use is UTP/ethernet, cheap and reasonably robust. (N.B. it's not carrying any load current, these are hall effect sensors with no connection to the circuit whose current is being measured)
However, and here's the problem, I can't find any RJ-45 sockets which can easily be mounted onto veroboard (or any other 0.1" pitch board) as every single RJ-45 socket I can find has the connections laid out as two rows of pins at 0.1" pitch between pins but at 0.05" offset between the two rows of four pins.
So can anyone suggest a way of connecting (in a removable way) UTP cable to a piece of veroboard? I've tried the following approaches to finding a solution but unsuccessfully so far:-
Looking at many, many types of RJ-45 socket to see if there's one which can mount on 0.1" pitch board.
Looking for prototype/veroboard which has either a general layout which can accomodate an RJ-45 socket or one which has specific RJ-45 socket pads.
Plugs/sockets other than RJ-45 which could do what I want, i.e. mini-DIN or similar.
Any suggestions would be most welcome. I could of course simple solder the RJ-45 direct to the veroboard (and tie it mechanically of course) but that would be much less convenient for installation and testing. Solutions using PCB header/connectors are possible but don't suit UTP particularly well.