I need some advice on wiring here though. As I mentioned in my initial post, I'm familiar with the concept of how to wire up arcade buttons to an encoder and daisy chaining them to each other and the ground. As far as my understanding goes, a PCB is doing the same thing, with the rubber contact pads of a joypad closing the circuit rather than the arcade button. The Retro Racer mini cab's PCB actually tells you what button does what and there's a ground wire too.
I don't see any components like diodes or capacitors on the mini cab's PCB, just the leaf switch.
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Assuming there are no components hiding on the back, your understanding is correct and it should be easy to connect the mini cab PCB to the ZD encoder.
- The ribbon cable input pins are connected to traces (narrow light green parts of the PCB) that lead to one side of the switches.
- The ribbon cable ground pins are connected to the backplanes (wide light green parts of the PCB) that lead to the other side of the switches. The backplanes are like a daisy-chain ground wire in normal arcade wiring.
WARNING: Ensure there are any no ground connections/wires to the PCB other than the two "GND" pins on the ribbon cable before connecting this PCB to the ZD encoder. If there is another ground connection/wire to the PCB, the mod described below will short 5v to ground.
The Zero Delay doesn't seem to have a ground labelled on it, so how would I go about wiring that in? (Also, each wire in the ribbon cable for each input is singular, so how do they get grounded? Something on the PCB itself connecting them up?)
Most ZD encoders are "active high" devices. (5v triggers the input port, not ground)
As you can see in this pic, the outer pins on the ZD are daisy-chained together via the outer backplane of the PCB.
- The outer backplane/pins are almost certainly providing 5v. It wouldn't hurt to verify this with your multimeter.
- When you press a button, the 5v from the outer backplane/pin is applied to the inner pin which is connected to the input port. 5v on the input port triggers the associated output.
Since the mini cab's PCB doesn't have any components like diodes or electrolytic capacitors on it, you can connect it to the ZD encoder.
- Connect one outer pin on the ZD (daisy-chained 5v) to one of the GND pins (daisy-chained grounds) on the mini cab PCB ribbon cable.
- Connect a different outer pin on the ZD to the other GND pin on the mini cab PCB ribbon cable.
- Connect the inner pins of the ZD (input ports) to the desired pins on the mini cab PCB ribbon cable.
Scott