I was wondering if shielded cables effective as shielded protection on SwitchBlox Rugged. I have last revision of switch who only have 4 pins connectors and saw that A/B/C revision have 5 pins with ground.
Does it bring more protection to have shielded cables on F revision ?
In nearly all cases, having a shielded cable is better than having a non-shielded cable because it provides protection against stray electromagnetic radiation.
However, for most of our customers’ applications they are connecting to devices very close by, therefore shielding is not a huge issue on the cable. In such situations, adding a shield increases the bend radius of the cable which makes it harder to route. Usually they prefer just keeping the cable without a shield and keeping it away from any potential EMI sources.
The general rule is that if the cable is longer than half a meter, and you expect to see a lot of EMI then a shield is useful to have.
However, you also have to consider what to connect the shield to. New versions of SwitchBlox Rugged no longer have a connection for the shield, so you have to connect it on the other end or some other ground point in your system.
If you share a little bit more about your system, like the type of devices and how close the cable will be to them, we can provide some application suggestions for you.