Hello everyone,

After pulling my hair i decided to ask for help. Basically i am looking for D-Sub 50 position Male connector, PCB solder (Through hole) and 90deg. I have found bunch of them in standard places (Mouser, DigiKey, Newark etc) but they charge an arm and leg. IF you have tips or suggestions, i am listening....

 

never mind... clearing cache of my browser got the results i was after...

 

They have them on Alibaba but minimum 500 - 1000 pcs @ ~$1 ea. Mostly found female SCSI

 

i don't need too many but for some reason i was only shown results for ones costing $35-144 CAD per piece. Well.... that IS steep. for such price i would consider making own machine to make those pesky connectors myself. Strange thing is that i got pretty much same results with hipped prices on several major websites which was throwing me off so i thought maybe prices did suddenly jump...

Then by chance i tried another browser and immediately knew that something is not right. Cleared up garbage and default browser is showing the expected too.. Now I got bunch of them for $5 a piece and that is much more ... reasonable.

i used to order things from China but eventually stopped as I absolutely hated the experience. Everyone likes bargain but i have little tolerance to long leads, communication with someone not good with English of German, not always getting what was ordered, inconsistency, no datasheets, poor tracking options, two packages never showed up. One of them was "lost" and other was delivered in Moscow area. Well, I hope some Russian enjoyed the parts i ordered and paid for...

If i am making design for something that will need to be repeated, i need to be able to reorder same parts and have confidence that this will come as ordered and in time expected - cannot waste time redesigning PCB because connectors etc are slightly different. So i'll pay when i have to...

I noticed that several other once common products that have become 'unicorns'. Of course that happens with obsoleted parts but segmented displays are active products yet segmented bargraph displays are apparently gone... except 5 and 10 segments.

 

Glad you found them. The 50 pin is an oddball except for SCSI and that is a different spacing from std D shell. There were some straight pin ones that would require time spent on jumpering from chassis mount to PCB. I agree China is frustrating for all of those reasons even though I try to look ahead and buy what I am going to need later. As I have said here before it is for my own personal use and if I were doing it commercially I wouldn't be using China.

 

i know but in this case i was forced to interface to products that use DB50 so not much choice there.

The whole idea was to avoid machining (making holes, engraving etc) and to reduce labor needed to assemble the unit so i really did not want to use options like DSUB with crimped contacts or solder buckets. Also wanted something that is easy to exchange in case of a problem. This version is quick and easy, just drop the connector and go over the pins with soldering iron... Previous units needed some 16h of manual labor to assemble, 2-4h to install and was rather inflexible. New one is 1h to assemble, 2min to install, it is compatible with different styles of equipment and it is dead easy to configure. The main difference is that individual wires are replaced by PCB and PCB itself is used as a panel so silkscreen already has all the labels etc. No more rats nest wiring and patchwork look. One of guys that was making previous version, fell of the chair when i showed him what this will be like. I wish i was prepared for it and recorded his reaction...