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John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Molex doesn't want to sell connectors
Jun 04, 2026
Last reply: 1 month ago
14 Replies
It’s only four bucks in onesies—cheap at twice the price!
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
But I can't get a data sheet. Or figure out what the PCB mate is.
"Contact Molex" just bounces between two web pages, runaround. If we have a regional rep, I can't find them.
Lots of data sheets these days are instant-generated PDFs, which would be great if they worked.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Molex et al. have this problem: when you bring out a new connector series, you have to look like it’s a full range, even if you did it for one big customer who buys one or two versions.
That leads to a lot of vaporware in connector catalogs.
One of my favorites is this Molex 1-mm three row fanout FFC with matching
0.3 mm jumpers. You can only get the 17-position ones iirc. Beautiful idea though!Cheers
Phil Hobbs
It can be worse. A long time ago NS launched a new microcontroler that would have been perfect for the project I was working on. Unfortunately, they never actually made it.
John, can't help with the Molex datasheet issue, but a long time ago (15-20 years) the cheapest and best supplier I found for Molex stuff (and several other lines) was
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Their price for actual Molex brand crimpers was half of anyone elses. No idea how they are to deal with these days, but worth a look. They would probably be helpful digging a datasheet out of Molex too :-).
plenty of other brands that make similar 3.81mm pitch connectors
That rings a bell ... what was it? we used their cmos NSC800 that had some Z80/8085 structure iirc....
That's called "testing the market" aka vaporware.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
We're designing a small 100 amp 100 volt pulsed laser driver, and don't have much panel space for the output connector. We figure the customer could screw his wires into that connector and then plug it into a mate in the box.
But we can't get a data sheet and don't know what PCB connector it would mate with.
Might cut over to Phoenix.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Molex are way overpriced.
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there's also TE/AMP plenty to chose from and ime they are all compatible
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They do look very similar. This might be the PCB mate:
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I guess we'll buy a bunch of connectors and see what works.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
Digikey has become sloppy with datasheet links. Often like here they plain don't work or end in an error message. I used to alert them but it has become so rampant that I've moved on to other distributors.
They used to be hands down the best when looking for parts. Not anymore :-(
<rant_mode_on>I think it boils down to poor upper management. What does it really take? Just a simple script or a bot that constantly churns through all their datasheet links and alerts staff when a link isn't working. But I guess they can't even figure that out.
<rant_mode_off>
Yeah, Digikey is a mess now.
It's useful as a first-pass parts search engine.
John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics
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