 Digikey and Adafruit bring it in. All right, this has become one of our more popular segments in the show. We have this as a standalone video that we have every Thursday as well. The latest, the greatest, all the new products that you want. Digikey has them. LadyAda picks the cool ones, the things that she wants to share, and then we call it I on MPI. This week, Molex. Molex is this week. Well, we spent a lot of time in the last few weeks looking at wireless chips and sensors and microcontrollers and all sorts of like kind of complicated advanced stuff. And I saw this pop up on the Digikey like slash new MPI release website. They were announcing this new partnership with Molex. And I was like, oh yeah, you know, a lot of people don't think about the cables. Cables are, you know, an extremely important part of every electronic design. But, you know, a bad cable will like totally mess everything up. And it's really common. Oftentimes cables come loose or a cable, you know, a wire comes out of the connector or it's not tinned correctly. And so maybe like it gets rusty. And then your entire product doesn't work. And it's pretty sad because everything else may be beautifully designed. But if you don't spend time to get good connectors and good cables, nothing works. And another thing that's frustrating about if people pick bad connectors and cables is that sometimes you don't find out until weeks, months or even years after the product has been released. So you end up having to do recalls and repairs. Or you know, you have people have a, you get a bad reputation for your product failing after a few months or years, which is no good. So I like Molex connectors. They're solid, they're dependable. They've been doing this for a really long time. And another thing is, you know, well let's say you design, your product has multiple boards or maybe it has some buttons and a button board. You want to have a connector on each end and then a cable that connects them. And, you know, we take cables for granted as engineers. You don't realize that they're actually really difficult to make correctly. And they can be fairly complicated. Wiring harnesses are not simple things. And so if you're designing a product and you want to get some custom cables made, historically you would either have to go to like a factory that was, you know, that would do cable design and you would go and talk to them. It would take a really long time to get samples made or you DIY them, which always ends up being a lot more complicated and time consuming than you think. Or now you can use the Molex and Digikey custom cable creator. That's right. Like the CCC as I like to call it. That's right. And you know, we'll show a video and some other things, but it's digikey.com slash and slash product dash highlight slash and slash molex slash custom dash cable dash creator. However, you could just type Digikey custom cable creator in any search engine and it'll just go there. But let's start this adventure. Let's go on a journey. Okay. So I was like, of course I'm going to have to create a custom cable. Okay. So you click on the button to get started. All right. Then what? So there's going to be three parts. Well, let's go a little bit more afterwards, but side a, which is one end connector and then the cable length and specifications and then side B, which is where our faces are at right now, but you would pick the other connector. Remember, it doesn't have to be the same connector. Sometimes you have harnesses that go from, you know, one type to another type and that's actually the kind of cable we'll be making. So let's click on side a. So when we click on that little gear logo, it'll pop this up and you can see that there's a couple dozen different options from, you know, the Pico blade, the Microfit, Minifit, Milligrid, Pico class, Denofit, Ultrafit, KK254, Duraclick, Begafit, Clickmate, et cetera, et cetera. So the question is, what am I trying to connect to? So I decided, okay, let's pick this sensor that I've got in the store. It's a QR, sorry, it's a barcode scanner. And you can see there it's got this kind of like USB cable thing that connects to like a white cable connector with four wires going into it. And this is designed, you can just plug it right into your USB motherboard. But let's say I want to have a custom cable because this is going to be embedded into microcontroller. And I want to have those cables. I want this sensor to be at the end of my mechanical connection or it's hanging out somewhere. And then a cable comes back and then plugs into my main board, which is going to have a .1 inch standard header. So first off, let's connect to the sensor itself. So, you know, it turns out that this is a Pico blade 1.25 millimeter pitch 11 pin connector. So let's select that. Great. So you select 11 circuits and that tin plating is fine for me. Receptical. There's also the other way around so you can have like, you know, sometimes cables can have the opposite connection type. So the photo that you see is actually the thing that you're going to get. So that's what I really like about this. As I was picking this out, it would show me a photo of exactly the connector, which is really handy. Because especially since like receptacle or plug, it's like, it's counterintuitive sometimes depending on how you think of it. So it's one row Pico blade 1.25 millimeter pitch. Great. So let's move on to the next step. Next step, we have to pick the assembly wires. And so I just picked 150 millimeters, which is about six inches. I don't care too much about the cable covering, you know, there's different UL certifications. I sort of picked the first one. When you have to pick the wire gauge, there's only a couple of options. In this case, it was like 28 or 26 because the crimp connectors can only take 26 or 28 wire gauge. So depending on your connector, you're going to have different wire gauges you can select. I just picked 28 because not high current carrying. So make it easy. Okay. So next up, we have to pick the other side. So there's actually one thing that I thought was interesting here is not every option is available. So you can of course pick the same Pico blade on the other side. But you'll see like DuraClick, the two millimeter pitch that you can't make to it because the wire gauge is too thin. That's helpful. To crimp. So they tell you what's not possible. They're like, you cannot connect. You can't make something that has these on the both ends. You'll have to have something in the middle or you have to come up with some other solution. That's cool. Okay. But so let's look at the device. So I only, you know, and this is a close up of that barcode scanner. So you see that there's this 11 pin connector, but I'm actually only connecting to the first four pins, the first four wires, black, red, green, white for USB because the rest of them are used for like you are or something. I don't want to connect to them. I only need those four wires. Okay. So next let's select a 2.54 millimeter pitch connector. This is the KK series. I want to have a 0.1 inch connector on the other side and this one is compatible with the wire gauge. It only needs four circuits because again, I only need those four USB pins. Single row and then again, receptacle, I'll have headers in board and tin plating is fine. Okay. So next up. Pin out. Pin out. So because we have two connectors and they're not equivalent, I kind of have to tell them which wires to plug into the first side to get into the second side. Right. This is where we start making out the specification. In this case, the default actually turns out to be like perfectly fine for me. It's the first four pins. If it was the middle pins, I'd have to, you know, click on the like update thing and then tell it like move over. And then the next step, I can select the pink wire colors. So on the step. How's all that too? Yeah, I tell it, you know, okay, these are the wire colors. So black for ground red for power and then green and white for data plus and data minus. And I like how it shows you where the latch is so you know what the polarity is, but then you'll see we also get a rendering. And you can edit the connection. So this is where you can start rearranging the pins if needed. Again, it turns out that direct one to one is perfectly fine. Okay. Okay, cool. So next, like extra fancy options now. Open braid is pretty cool as taping. You can get wire ties labeled. I actually don't need any of that as a cable, but this is available. Of course, you'll pay more for it. It's becoming more advanced assembly. So I'm not going to check these off and go next. All right. Okay, then I filled this out. So the way it works is that I think Molex actually does the manufacturing than Digikey does the sales and you know, ships it to me. And you can request a sample though. I did get an email saying that because of COVID-19, the facility is very delayed. And so you're not going to get a sample nearly as quickly as usual. It might take a couple of weeks. Okay. So I filled this out, click submit. You tell it, you know, approximate annual usage that can give you a quote for that amount and you submit it. And that's it. Okay. All right. So then a day later, actually, sorry, we'll get to the day later. So the next thing I want to show is, yes, you can get custom cables, but don't forget you can also get pre-made cables. So if you have pretty standard, you know, same end to end cables and, you know, you don't mind the wire colors being all the same. You can go to the off the shelf cable assemblies that are available at Molex. And these are all available at Digikey as well. So for example, if you go to Digikey, you just go to cable assemblies, you'll see they have 2,000 different cable assemblies. And some of these are USB cables. Sorry, they have more than 2,000. They have 300,000 total cable assemblies. Some of these are like, you know, d-sub cables, d-sub cables, but I also found that they had, you know, some picoblade to picoblade connectors. So it could be that for some low pin count, I think it's like, you know, six pins or less, you can get straight through cables or of various lengths for different connectors. So if you have the same connector on both ends, of course, you're going to have an easier time getting a pre-assembled cable. And of course, those are going to be cheaper and off the shelf so you can get them immediately. Yeah. Another option, if you're like me and maybe you're impatient, you don't want to wait for somebody to assemble a cable, but you hate crimping cables because it's so easy to accidentally nick the cable or it's just, it's just, it's just hard. Like you can do an okay job crimping, but to do a really good job, you really need a machine or be an expert. You can get pre-crimped leads. So these wires will fit, you know, the Molex connectors. They have the socket or pin ends on them and then you just get the housings and you plug them in. So that's a much easier way and that can be very fast because the time consuming part of cutting, stripping, you know, tending, crimping, that's taken care of. And these are very inexpensive as well and they're available in multiple colors. Okay. So, you know, while I was looking at this a day later, I got an email and they give you a rendering of the cable. That's cool. So it's cropped in a bit, but it's the, you get a rendering of the whole cable and a step file. So you can, you know, rotate it around and verify that the latch is on the side you want and the cable colors are what you want. So you can even see the black, red, green, white cables and the latches and the different connectors. And they'll also give you a data sheet, which is like automatically generated. It was kind of cool. So they show you, this is your spec sheet for the cable, which I actually think is pretty handy because, like, even if you end up not having Molex assembly your cable, but you're making a Molex cable, the fact that you can kind of get this just will can save you a lot of time if you don't want to have to go through and like make or draw your own data sheet. So I thought this was pretty handy, especially if it's automated. Okay. And so that's where you do it. We do have a video that we're going to play. And this is one minute of Molex. This is your Molex minute. Molex minute. Yeah. That kind of goes over some of this stuff too. It's a good video. So we want to play it. Take away Molex. Choose from many different product connector families, circuit sizes, wire gauges, UL styles, cable lengths and more. Our proprietary pinout configurator allows you to select wire colors and individual circuits for your unique applications. In addition to your free drawing and 3D model, you can request a quote and mechanical sample. The Molex custom cable creator available at Molex.com. Awesome. So I think, especially if you're an industry and you're like, I need a couple hundred cables. I need them really well made. I don't want to wait, you know, to get a quote from overseas or some other factory. You know, you're going to get Molex quality and did you keep a little sound to you and. That's right. Too sweet. So check it out and just for fun, you know, maybe just try it out. You know, no obligation to purchase. Design up a cable, especially like getting the 3D model was super cool. Thanks for making that connection, Lady Aida. And that is.