IDE wiring for mini ipac

[ratzz]

Hi all,

Has anyone built their own harness using an IDE header (with possibly an electrical box) and a bunch of wires?

I know the easiest option would be to just order one, but I'd like to have a go -- I feel that it will be a good learning experience for me as wiring is the one skill I could do with honing. I also think that it might be a bit of fun!

Anyway, has anyone got any pics of this, maybe in a project build? I could do with picking up a few tips before I give it a go.

If not, then I will give it a go and document it on my project thread.

Thanks guys .... 

[Spaz Monkey]

Not to be a wet blanket, but why would you do something like that when Andy already sells one?  Looks like it would be maybe $20 USD with shipping.  It seems to me, you don't want to go to the lumber shop and buy some lumber, but you want to grow your own forest to get the lumber.

[tomsurfnj]

I used a mini-pac for my project. I did buy the wiring harness. I found it to be a great choice as the wires are color coded and you could download the corresponding map. if you run into any problems. One thing about the harness is that it uses .250 female connectors and my microswitches were .187 male. I had to crimp almost every connector a bit beforeplugging onto the switch.

Good luck if you decide to make your own. But I think it would be more of a headache to split, strip, and crimp every connector. Also the gauge wire on IDE cables seem very hard to work with.

Tom

[knave]

Never you mind the naysayers ratzz!  I'm with you I picked up a minipac and intend to do the same thing.  I have tons of old IDE cables...they are not much good for anything else.  I want to do it because it will be fun, not a pain at all. Plus when he was doing the special it was like 50% cheaper  .

What I plan to do is use the pinout map from the Ultimarc minipac site and use a couple of terminal strips.  Then I can lable them and run whatever wires I want.

I don't expect any issues.

[langdoguk]

I wired mine into a connector block and labelled them, then just run a wire out to each connection , it was very easy 

[ratzz]

Thanks for that guys  ... I was beginning to think i'd asked something really dumb!!

Yea, I plan to use one of those blocks to connect things to. In fact, there is a diagram for this on the Ultimarc website, so I assumed it'd been done before, and it's also mentioned about using an IDE connection.

I, too, have loads of these leads spare from previos PC builds, and I'm in no rush to finish my cab.

Ratzz 

[Dervacumen]

I'm about to begin wiring my own harness as well.  I found the diagram on Andy's site a bit confusing so I put this one together.  Can someone confirm I have the pin outs correct?

[knave]

I think there's an additional ground at pin 40.  Unless this is just for the trackball stuff...

Here take a look:

Minipac wiring

[ratzz]

Does this help any?

I've removed the wire colours and moved the pin numbers on to the line.

[BobA]

Something looks wrong with the spinner wiring.   For the trackball the 5V and GND are shown as not going back to the minipac.  Just the signal wires are drawn in.   On the spinner 2 wires are drawn in but the 5V and GND are marked differently and GND is shown drawn in and going to the minipac.   There was a discussion of this earlier and I do not remember what the resolution was.    Since a spinner needs 2 signals plus a gnd and 5V it way it is shown the blue wire (2) does not go anywhere so something is incorrect.

[northerngames]

only the mini-pac with opti support has the tackall and spinner options.

if your not using the opti stuff you could just throw the IDE on and connect the wires to whatever joystick and then go back and resighn all the keys through the ipac programming tools.

I ordered the wire kit but there only 18" long and did not get me too far on a CP that is 42" wide.

so instead of putting everything in the correct spot I just wired everything up and then reprogrammed the mini-pac to do what I wanted it to do.

[ratzz]

only the mini-pac with opti support has the tackall and spinner options.

if your not using the opti stuff you could just throw the IDE on and connect the wires to whatever joystick and then go back and resighn all the keys through the ipac programming tools.

I ordered the wire kit but there only 18" long and did not get me too far on a CP that is 42" wide.

so instead of putting everything in the correct spot I just wired everything up and then reprogrammed the mini-pac to do what I wanted it to do.

I didn't realise you could do that! I haven't installed the software yet.

You mean to say that it makes absolutely no difference how the hole thing is wired? Well why doesn't Andy say that on the site (unless I've missed it)? It changes everything.

This must be the way to go ... Cheers 

[AndyWarne]

It certainly is a valid approach to wire up in any convenient way and worry about key assignment later. This is especially easy to do if you use the interactive programming mode (www.ultimarc.com/interact.html) because this mode reacts to actual button presses to select the control being assigned, rather than entering data into a table in WinIPAC which means you need to know how its been wired.
Its not unusual for some wires to be short on a larger panel, which is why we supply an extension wire pack. Or simply splicing in extra length is not too difficult.
About the spinner wiring, the actual connections of the spinner plug vary depending on the age of the harness. Originally it was pinned for the Oscar Spinners, which used a different pinout to the trackball connectors, but after Oscar disappeared we changed it to the same pinout as the trackballs.
All boards support the optical controls.

[ratzz]

Thanks Andy ... 

[mushmouth]

I recently got a mini-pac and  on a 36" wide panel, I had to extend roughly half the wires on the harness. I'm not sure why the decision was made to use .25 connectors when nearly every arcade connector uses .187 terminals, but I'm handy with a soldering iron, so I simply changed them out. Having the process started with the harness still makes the harness-making task immensely faster.

If those wires were 8 " longer or so and had .187's on the ends, it would be an absolutely perfect product. To have all this on a board SO small is quite an accomplishment.