acidosmosis
Posts: 1,310 +0
I recently became interested in doing a Molex connector mod. This mod consists of soldering a LED light onto the 5v (red) wire and the ground (black) wire. This makes your molex connector light up which can look very interesting.
Take a look at this website for How To on molex modding, and images of the final result.
http://www.metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/molexlight/index_eng
The main problem you encounter when doing this mod is, it is hard to find an LED that is small enough that runs on 5volts. I'm not even sure a 5volt 3mm LED exists. Because of thise you need a resistor. The resistor is either going to stick out of the molex connector a bit or your going to have to figure out a way to fit the resistor+led inside the molex. The method I am choosing to use is to just led the resistor stick out a bit, and place an inch of heatshrink around the wires outside of the molex (since I am going to be doing that anyway after installing wire sleeves, it all works out).
Well, today was my very first time ever soldering. I think I did pretty good. I ran into a small problem with this though. It's hard to get the molex pins back into the molex after doing this. You have to make sure there is no connection between the 5v wire and the ground wire other than the LED light or you'll end up shorting/frying something. You also have to eliminate part of the "wall" inside the molex connector that is between the 5v/ground wires so that you can fit the LED inside. Not sure what is a good tool to do this though -- if you can think of one let me know. You need to eliminate about 75% of the "wall" .. the other 25% needs to stay there so your two molex pins dont end up touching each other as a result of taking out the plastic wall.
my first soldering job (look below)
Take a look at this website for How To on molex modding, and images of the final result.
http://www.metku.net/index.html?sect=view&n=1&path=mods/molexlight/index_eng
The main problem you encounter when doing this mod is, it is hard to find an LED that is small enough that runs on 5volts. I'm not even sure a 5volt 3mm LED exists. Because of thise you need a resistor. The resistor is either going to stick out of the molex connector a bit or your going to have to figure out a way to fit the resistor+led inside the molex. The method I am choosing to use is to just led the resistor stick out a bit, and place an inch of heatshrink around the wires outside of the molex (since I am going to be doing that anyway after installing wire sleeves, it all works out).
Well, today was my very first time ever soldering. I think I did pretty good. I ran into a small problem with this though. It's hard to get the molex pins back into the molex after doing this. You have to make sure there is no connection between the 5v wire and the ground wire other than the LED light or you'll end up shorting/frying something. You also have to eliminate part of the "wall" inside the molex connector that is between the 5v/ground wires so that you can fit the LED inside. Not sure what is a good tool to do this though -- if you can think of one let me know. You need to eliminate about 75% of the "wall" .. the other 25% needs to stay there so your two molex pins dont end up touching each other as a result of taking out the plastic wall.
my first soldering job (look below)