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Have you chaps come across this type of connector before?

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PlantBoy

Electrical
Aug 16, 2007
14
I am working with quite an old Lab Microscope Camera. It has some connectors as shown below. Searching for derivatives of "4 pin connector" appears to only bring up Din type connections.

The male connection has 4 pins with a half circle around 2 of them, which fits snugly with the half circle on the female connector. The two red dots match up when the connectors are connected.

What I'd like to do is attach this microscope to a computer, so I'll probably chop off the ends and attach a USB connector. But I'd prefer if I could know what pin does what before I start bodging the new connector on.

IMAG0105_wia9d3.jpg

IMAG0101_ekftsg.jpg

IMAG0106_cmvi33.jpg
 
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Looks expensive. Must be a Lemo connector.

Gunnar Englund
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
Lemo does appear to have close matches! Though the connectors they show don't have the half circle shield on the inside. Could be a feature removed from the design though...

If it is a removed feature then I may have to crack the camera on and have a look-ee inside. Camera has no serial number, model number, or identifying marks.

I was kind of hoping that there was going to be a chart showing standard pin configurations...
 
If you are really asking about the connector itself, then: or their main page:
However, your last sentence implies that you need to know what the pin assignment is. Since this is most likely to be proprietary to the microscope manufacturer, not providing that critical information will hamper any responses that you might get.

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
faq731-376 forum1529
 
I was kind of hoping there was going to be a standard. I think you might be right IRstuff and opposed to being propietary, it most likely was lab built/thrown together...
 
It wouldn't take that much to o-scope the leads, would it?

TTFN
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!
faq731-376 forum1529
 
Me, too! Messen ist wissen.
Most new scopes have decoding of USB and other protocols.

Gunnar Englund
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
If it's "an old" camera, and if that's the only cable, then it's likely DC power one way and composite video the other. If there's zero info, then you might have to disassemble the camera to determine (reverse engineer) the power supply parameters, and then power up to confirm or refute video signal.

Another trick is to search Google Images for 'Microscope Camera'. As it's images, it's pretty quick to scan through a thousand or more images looking for that model, in case somebody has posted any useful information. It works about half the time.
 
The 2 pins without the shields are likely power and the 2 pins with what appear to be shields could mean the signal is split as Y/C or one pin could be some kind of control to the camera while the other is a video output.

Being very old, I would highly doubt it is using USB. You'll need some kind of interface to go between the USB and the camera.

 
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