Kick Harness and Ground

[jheiger]

I apologize for what is probably a simple question. I have a cps2 setup I recently acquired. I put in all new buttons and joystcks. I decided to get a new jamma harness and new kick harness since the old one was a mess of splices and solder. So the new jamma harness has a nice daisy chain for the ground and I was able to ground all the joystics and buttons with it. My question is, what do I do with the ground wires on the kick harness? ignore them? attach them to the existing ground daisy chain loop? or should I only use the jamma ground for the punch buttons and joysticks, and then create a separate ground daisy chain for the kick harness buttons? I appreciate any insite, I would like to do this correctly and safely if possible.

As an aside, what is considered bast practice regarding "extra" wires on the jamma harness? mine has additional wires for buttons 4 and 5 on player one and 2 sides. cut them off? Leave them dangling? Thank you.

[Gilrock]

I'm not familiar with that system but looked it up and it sounds like the kick harness just extended the number of buttons available from the standard jamma harness.  So if I follow this right you connected one side of the kick buttons to the kick harness and the other side of the kick buttons to the ground daisy chain from the jamma harness.  Since those are all button inputs and don't carry much current its probably fine the way you did it.  I'd bet all those grounds are tied together on the board anyways.  If I saw a schematic of this whole thing I could say for sure.  I'm a EE and I wouldn't be afraid to power it up and try it the way you have it but its your stuff so do what you are comfortable with.

For my extra jamma wire I just zip tied nicely and let them hang.  So unless you like to show off how pretty the wiring is inside don't worry about it.

[jheiger]

Thank you. That makes sense

[Nephasth]

Ground is ground is ground... and it's important.

[Gilrock]

You can plug two DC power supplies into the same AC circuit and the grounds will not be the same unless you physically wire the DC grounds together.  We have to teach people this all the time in our Christmas light shows.  It takes several power supplies to power up a mega tree and if the grounds don't get tied together the data gets messed up and its quite visible.

[Nephasth]

How many xmas lights are powered by a kick harness? ... 

[Gilrock]

As long as you got the point that all grounds are relative....lol.