
DB-19 Substitute, Take Two - yuhong
http://www.bigmessowires.com/2016/02/23/db-19-substitute-take-two/
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bsder
Did anyone call Sullins Connector Corp? (I feel like I'm repeating myself, for
some reason. Did I suggest this last year?)
[http://sullinscorp.com/](http://sullinscorp.com/)

They probably made that Apple connector originally.

I see that they've EOL'd their DB lines just last year, but they might still
have the molds. They might be willing to keep a single DB-19 mold if they know
that they've got a captive order every year.

I really recommend them if you need a connector. They were awesome to deal
with.

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elfchief
This reminds me of what I went through back in ~2004 with a VW wiring harness.

I had a product (a little toy that would give better control over the
automatically-deploying spoiler behavior on turbocharged New Beetles) that was
built around one specific VW wiring harness.

Apparently not many extras of the harnesses were manufactured, because after
we bought ~15 of them (just enough for our first small run), the main
distributor for parts in the US ran out of them. We got a few more by having
some dealers do nationwide parts searches for us, but we had basically ended
up buying out the entire country for this particular harness.

We spent a ton of time trying to figure out how to work around this. We'd
really hoped that we would be able to just construct the harnesses ourselves,
but the connectors ended up being custom parts that the OEM was unwilling to
sell to us. For a while we thought about giving people a discount on the
product if they'd send their old harness to us, but we only had a couple left
at the time, so that would really end up trashing our throughput. In the end,
we just ended up waiting until their was new stock available, almost a year
later. It really sucked to have a product that a bunch of people wanted, and
not be able to ship it because of a couple of connectors!

Anyhow, yeah ... I feel the author's pain.

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mikepurvis
Surprising to me that it isn't more cost effective to use the female connector
as a jig in manufacturing a PCB-based solution, or maybe a halfway, where it's
a PCB anchoring the male pins and then a 3D-printed shell.

There are also generic round pins available, though they're probably skinnier
than the standard d-shell ones: [http://www.digikey.ca/product-
detail/en/TS-106-G-A/SAM1111-0...](http://www.digikey.ca/product-
detail/en/TS-106-G-A/SAM1111-06-ND/1105456)

Another potential janky solution would be a partially-populated DB-25.

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cmrdporcupine
The Atari ST series also used a DB-19 connector, for its DMA/ACSI (variant of
SCSI) port. This has been a hassle recently for the Atari community. If the
author of the article is interested in producing and selling new DB-19
male/female connectors, I'm sure he'd find customers in the ST community.

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xkcd-sucks
Hopefully he gets a bunch manufactured and resells them-- This is the guy that
bought up most of the world's db19 connectors for an old apple floppy emu,
leaving NeXT computer enthusiasts to use such alternatives as chopped off db25
connectors/19x pin-to-pin wires as monochrome monitor/bus cables

~~~
bsder
So, why don't you guys band together with him and cut the mold?

$10,000 isn't that much spread over 3 different communities. (Apple, NeXT,
Atari ST).

Yet, nobody is stepping up to cut a check. Perhaps I should call you all a
bunch of cheap bastards.

$109 for the board, bill of materials, and software work that has gone into it
is _CHEAP_. If he were charging $150, he could probably cut the mold himself.

However, he knows his business. Presumably, if he could charge more, he would.

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Animats
The pins are standard and on some types of connector, are crimped first, then
pushed into the housing block. All you need to manufacture is the plastic
housing block. That's a reasonable part to have made by commercial 3D
printing.

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userbinator
There's definitely companies in China who will do custom connectors, and since
a DB-19 is not exactly "custom" but just a different configuration of an
existing one, it might not be so expensive. MOCs are still going to be high
though.

~~~
gherkin0
This guy has already explored pretty much every avenue to get more of these
connectors:

[http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/03/20/finding-a-
db-19-ange...](http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/03/20/finding-a-
db-19-angering-the-internet/)

[http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/01/designing-a-
db-19-su...](http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/01/designing-a-
db-19-substitute/)

[http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/02/bagging-the-
db-19/](http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/02/bagging-the-db-19/)

[http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/12/db-19-madness/](http://www.bigmessowires.com/2015/02/12/db-19-madness/)

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gaur
Wow. I always figured (naively) that dsubs were available with whatever (odd)
number of pins you wanted.

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goldenkey
First flappy bird, now floppy emus. Im entranced by our culture guys :-)

