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Connectors for swappable control panels
b3atmania:
As I am going to have multiple controlpanels on my cabinet I was thinking about how to make swapping a panel easy without having to rewire the IPac and OptiPac.
One solution would be to have every control panel having its own IPac and/or OptiPac so only two USB cables would have to be connected. Not very cost-effective.
Therefore I would like to mount the IPac and OptiPac fixed in the cabinet and put some connector between them and the control panel.
Now, I have to decide on some kind of connector. I need something that has sufficient pins for an IPac56 and OptiPac plus some more for lights and jumpers. It must also be resistant to many connect/disconnect actions so that leaves out connectors that have pins that are held by friction like parallel port cables. The pins on those break/bend very easy.
What do you guys recommend?
paigeoliver:
Get some jamma size (or larger) edge connectors at your local electronics bits place, and get a fingerboard to go between them.
Smittydc:
I used an rs-232 cable and wiring blocks -- haven't had any problems with them.
Brad Lee:
Cant really tell color from the pics but on the CP side, white/blue is always P1up, blue/white is always P1down, white/green=p1b1, green/white=p1b2- the color follows from the wiring block(coming out of the ipac/optipac)
The wire itself is 25pair, 50 wires. Using every input on a ipac2 and the Optipac, I came up with 48 unique leads, and used the other 2 for +5v and ground
The ends on these cables(rj-21) come in male and femald and they kinda snap together, they dont come loose. I just make sure that Ive got a few spare male ends and use that on the panel.
oh, one more showing that it is infact just one cable coming out of the control panel
SirPoonga:
because I have my common buttons (start, coin, quit, pause) on my shelf that freed up enough inputs to use a parallel port connector for my control panel. You should see pic of it on my website.