I got a delivery notification this morning. It was that my 6-pin mini din cables were in the post to arrive today. One of the components of the interfaces that have been tough to track down have been these cables which are needed to interface to the “data” port on the back of the radio. The first lot I ordered turned out only to be 4 pin mini-din cables, the second lot were listed as 6 pin.
When they arrived I cut one in half and started buzzing them out to figure out which wires went to which pins. Everything looked ok, there were 6 wires, but 2 pins weren’t buzzing out to wires. Maybe I had a faulty one? Check the other half of the cable? Nope! No dice! Grab a second cable and test it end-to-end, and what do you know ….. of the 6 pins, only four are connected end to end.
So, in the bin those went and I bit the bullet and ordered some cables from Digikey.
Those should be here in about a week and hopefully, finally, I’ll have some more stock in the store. I also took the opportunity to order some more components to assemble a total of 100 interfaces. My boards came in last week and I’ve populated 10 boards (only 9 pictured) but I bought over 200 boards because it worked out that at that quantity they only were about 50c each, which, despite a 8 year lapse in the product will allow me to keep it at the original offered price of $45AUD plus shipping.
So, hopefully, in a week, the interfaces will be back in stock and available for purchase again. In the meantime, have some pictures of the boards.
