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Geez, I can't believe I am asking questions on how to do stuff.
paigeoliver:
Ok. Bear with me here, I actually have a couple of questions.
#1. When wiring 5 volt or 12 volt lights off the PC power supply do you go ground wire >bulb > bulb > bulb > +5 volts. Or do you separately daisy chain the grounds and +5s. Or is there any actual difference? The more I thought about it, the less difference there seemed to be, because light bulbs have never seemed to care about which power wire is which.
#2. I planned on going a pseudo jamma route with my current project. Would there be any ps2 or USB issues involved with doing the following.
Taking a JAMMA harness and wiring up a keywhiz, PS2 mouse cable, a USB cable, and perhaps a gameport cable to it. So that part plugs into the computer.
Then individual panels would be wired to a JAMMA fingerboard that would plug in and appropriately hit up the keywhiz, USB cable, gameport cable or mouse cable as needed?
A Jamma harness has 56 wires. a max of 22 would be needed for control panel inputs, 2 for ground, 4? USB, 5? mouse port, 1 for +5 volts, and 15 for gameport (total 49). That would leave me 7 extra wires in case I wanted to go crazy and add something else as well.
Anyone forsee any problems?
Minwah:
#1 Daisy-chain (ie wire in parallel). If you wire in series the voltage will be split across however many bulbs you have, making them dim.
#2 Um, someone else can have a go...
LoRDDeVO:
#1 if you go wire>bulb>bulb>bulb> you drop voltage due to the resistance of the bulb each bulb you go across. if you wire them in parallel (all +5 wires to one point and all ground wires to one point( you will keep a contant voltage across the bulbs.
As for the rest of the questions, I have no idea ;D
garyh:
Can't help with #2, but for #1 you first suggestion is a series connection and your second a parallel connection.
Series:
+ve - - - - B - - - - - B - - - - - B ----- -ve
Parallel
+ve--------+---------+-----------+
B B B
-ve --------+---------+-----------+
Series wiring is simpler but in the above example each bulb will only have 1/3 of the total voltage across it, i.e. for a 12v supply each bulb will see 4volts, plus if one bulb blows they all go out. If you are using 12v bulbs they will be dim with only 4v
Parallel wiring gives each bulb the full supply voltage.
Hope this helps.
Gary
paigeoliver:
Ok, to make question 2 SIMPLER.
Does a computer have any issue with any of the following.
A USB cable hooked up with nothing attached.
A PS2 mouse cable hooked up with nothing attached.
Or a gameport cable hooked up with nothing attached.
I wouldn't THINK so, but I never tried the mouse cable or gameport one.
If there are no problems with the above.
Then would there be any issues in spitting up any of those cables over fatter (IE, JAMMA) wires over part of their length?