Diablo Series 30 connectors

Is anyone aware of a source for the Winchester MRAC connectors used for the disk bus and power connections on the Diablo series 30 disk drives? Alternatively, has anyone built something compatible using pogo pins or an array of contacts mounted to a circuit board that could connect to the drive?

I think the last time I needed power connectors I just watched on ebay for them
someone on eBay is selling complete bus cable assys

Al Kossow said:

I think the last time I needed power connectors I just watched on ebay for them
someone on eBay is selling complete bus cable assys

Click to expand...

Thanks! I saw this cable but wasn't certain whether it was the right one. It does say Cable model 30 though

I was hoping to find a reliable supply of connectors or means to make them so people could easily mix RK05 emulators with Diablo drives.

George,

If you find any, please include at least 6 for me for my Arraid drives. Thank you.

gwiley said:

Thanks! I saw this cable but wasn't certain whether it was the right one. It does say Cable model 30 though

Click to expand...

I was speaking with the seller separately and it sounds like he is getting ready to list an inventory of Diablo 31's and 33F's at some point and has a smaller assortment of cables and power supplies. I would not be surprised if that data cable is compatible with the lot.

Edited: Nevermind. Looks like he already has the drives listed in the store.

gwiley and I have been working the problem. I have a stash of winchester connectors. the problem is my cables are mostly in a building I won't have access to until the end of June now.
I have a couple on cables I'm going to desolder so he can prototype an adapter.
An outstanding question is how common is a plug on the drive end of the cable from the interface in the cpu as opposed to a socket. I think the Alto was weird using a socket. Terminators
with sockets seem much more common than plugs and my tester cables use plugs.

If the cables get down to where they are $25/connector end, it may be worth buying from the guy for all of the associated hardware like the thumb screws that you'd be nickel and dimed
to death on buying new as components.

I need to take better picture, but there are a few up for the diablo cables up now under http://bitsavers.org/pdf/diablo/disk/model_30/cables_terminators/
Pictures of the RK03 adapters are under http://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/disc/rk03/RK11C-RK03-Connectors/ they use unibus cables for drive/drive cabling

attached is all of the info on male mrac42 plugs. they are expensive and the solder tail 8142 pins are hard to find and around 2$ PER PIN

as insane as it is https://www.ebay.com/itm/191911398847 is the going price

I also found some notes about my hunting for these connectors 15 years ago.

In addition to the adapter PCB, I/m looking into using one of the following types of pins to make the "P" side of the connector:

Have some in the Digikey cart to try them out to see how well they fit in the Diablo "S" side of the connector.
Pins on the Diablo MRAC42P are 0.062" diameter.

To make the "P" side of the connector, do something like this:
It might be necessary to fit a thin plastic 3D printed piece with 42 holes over the base of the pins after soldering, not sure about that yet.

The mounting screws are a harder problem. A thumb screw, aka shoulder screw could attach one side. The part with the nut in the shaft I don't know yet. Maybe something like a shoulder screw permanently fixed to a round metal threaded standoff.

However, the first step is to just make a Diablo adapter using a real MRAC42P and confirm that it works.

I'm pretty excited about this MRAC discussion, gwiley's note above sounds very workable. Last year I did a template for an attempt workalike MRAC with scalable pin matrix for almost all of the sizes. The idea was to use regular PC power supply pin sockets instead of real pins as they require a special tool to insert and extract. This was were I left it, next step was/is to put the calculated shell perimeter on and position the jackscrew holes. This was how it looked (yellow CAD model)
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?t...o-diskinterface-on-ebay.1241324/#post-1294654
EDIT I ran the OpenSCAD script to generate the regular sizes