frechett@boulder.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) (10/26/90)
Ok.. I have been pestering the people at my local electronics store and I think that I have found a lead on the connectors that we all need. Looking through a 3M catalog, I found some .079 inch [2mm] spacing, 28 gauge connectors. They are basically everything that we need. They can be found in any number of pins. Unfortunately the dealer that I was at is not a "master" distributer so cannot get these little beauties. The person that was helping me seemed to be a bit reluctant to give me the name of the master distributer, as the name that he gave me for the Denver area doesn't exist. So..... I am asking if anyone out there has a 3M distributer nearby. If so then the cables are available, and I suspect that there is someone out there willing to distribute them given a little bit of money. I would love to do it but I don't have the time. Anyone want to check this out? I am still going to continue to try to find them here but if we could come up with them somewhere else that would be great too. I have other things that I am looking into also but this one seems to be the most promising. ian -- -=Runaway Daemon=-
frechett@boulder.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) (10/27/90)
It's a conspiracy...... Guess what... 3M JUST discontinued the .079 connectors. I learn this only after about 8 phone calls. They just don't make it, so we is back to square one. Why the hell it this thing such a royal pain in the ass to find. Ah well suchislife. Oh and don't tell me to just buy one to save time... I already made one, I am just trying to save a bit of money for a bunch of my friends. ;) ian
frechett@boulder.Colorado.EDU (-=Runaway Daemon=-) (10/31/90)
After perstering enough people around here about 2mm connectors.. my name was reffered to someone who deals with odd size connectors all the time. (he is working on supersmall hard drives) He happened to have two 50 hole 2mm spacing connectors. That is a very thin connector with 25 pins over 25 pins. Needless to say, I cut it up into 5, 4 hole over 4 hole connectors. I found that even with the extra 4 holes these things are so small that they still fit in the port on the hp. I promptly put together 2 PC/MODEM to hp connectors and one hp to hp connector. (my friend and I transfer all the time) No, I don't have any of these beauties to sell, but I wanted to say that this person gave me some good info on how to track donw more of these connectors.. In case anyone cares. They are made by dupont (BERG) ;) and the part number for the connector with staight pins out the back is 88333-050 and the other one that has bent pins out the back which I have not used at all yet is part number 86455-150. I get the funny impression that these are a bit more available than 4 pins connectors by themselves. It is no problem at all to cut the 25 pins across down to 5 4 pin connectors, so it might be worth while to look into the availabily of them in your area. I was also told that elco is supposed to have some nice ones and samtech (dunno if sp is right) is going to have them real soon. I was also told to check with the local reps. They get paid to hand out free samples. If you tell them that you need to check out a 2mm connector for a school project (robot or somethine ;) they are likely to dig something up and give it to you. As I said, they get paid to do this. To the person that suggested that all this is a waste of time... I know of three people that would disagree with you tommorow when I get them their cables, and I truely look forward to my 9600 baud hp-hp connection. I found that the IR runs the batteries down faster than wire as I could still do wire transfers well after my battery had gotten too low for IR. I don't think that hp sells anything like an hp-hp cable and I made mine in a whopping 15 minutes. and the other PC-hp cable in 10. Another couple and I could sell them.. (I don't plan to, unless I had some spare time, energy, and money, which I don't right now). Oh and something else that I should mention about the construction was that I moved to a different type of wire. Found a nice 20 strand 10 color flat wire that can easily be cut into 5 4 strand wires. This is also the finer gauge wire than normal. The spacing is 1.5mm. Perfect for what we are doing. As long as I don't get any noise at 9600 baud I should be ok. But, do you notice a certain symetry here? 5 connectors out of one and 5 wires out of one... ;) Cuts down on production costs if anyone is interested. Hope someone can gleen some useful information from this post. ian -- -=Runaway Daemon=-