Are there Powered Up compatible connectors available?

Question

I'm interested in experimenting with custom LEGO Powered Up peripherals. Are there connectors available that I can use to interface with the hub?

Answer 1

There do not appear to be any compatible connectors available currently. You can obviously splice cables from the official components, but that's expensive and makes those components unusable.

I hope that someone has a better answer, but the best that I've been able to do so far is to use a modified SATA connector. I first saw this in a video that demonstrated that the pin separation is the same between the two connectors.

Here's a standard SATA connector:

With a little Dremel work, you can expose the pins and reduce the width enough to fit the SATA connector into the Powered Up hub:

Here's the Powered Up connector for reference:

Notice that the SATA connector uses one extra pin. The pin on the right is extra and will not make contact with anything.

The first 6 pins line up with the hub just fine:

The SATA connector is unfortunately a little too thin to fit snugly:

If you can get it wedged in using some sort of shim (paper, cardboard, etc) you should be able to get a good connection.

Answer 2

Appears you can purchase them on AliExpress, here's some of the vendors I found: here here here

"10Pcs/lot Programming Series Robots Model Building Blocks Education Steam Connector Cabe Parts For WEDO 2.0 Motors Sensor Toys"

From this article:

This connector first appeared in WeDo 2.0 set (45300) in 2016. It allows to connect sensors and motors to the controller. This 6-wire system progressively replaces the Power Functions 4-wire system. This system was initially named "Power Functions 2.0" but it was then used in 2017 Boost Creative Toolbox (17101), 2019 Powered Up trains, and 2019 Control + Technic sets, so naming this system remains... tricky! But as of publishing, it looks like LEGO gathered these avatars under the common "Powered Up" banner.

So looks like searching for WeDo is more fruitful than Powered Up since that's a more recent branding.

I am in no way affiliated with any vendors.

Answer 3

This is a great suggestion, however; use the HDD end instead.

Just grab an old HDD (SATA) and use the flat pin connectors (not the spring ended ones suggested above). If you are careful with the side cutters you can actually recover two connectors from one HDD header. (One from the power and one from the data)

Answer 4

You can also 3d print the plugs.

See https://www.biasedlogic.com/index.php/lego-powered-up-connector/