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Connectors for swappable control panels
paigeoliver:
Ok. Yes, you use two identical female edge connectors. You could technically skip the one inside the cabinet itself and instead solder your connections onto the fingerboard itself, but that is a pain in the butt (and is harder to fix if you break it).
A fingerboard basically looks like the edge of a Nes cartridge. There is nothing fancy about it, just straight traces from one side to the other.
You can order JAMMA fingerboards from tons of places. Get 2 of them, so you will have a replacement in case you break one later. Just get the plain ones that are straight across. Not the fancy ones with cutouts or the ones designed to be soldered all over.
If you can't find any cheap JAMMA edge connectors, then just start looking for 56 pin edge connectors. My local random electronics component store had 3 cases of the darn things, which were exactly the same as JAMMA connectors except that they were not "keyed" (which means they could be plugged in either way).
telengard:
--- Quote from: b3atmania on May 28, 2003, 10:29:09 am ---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?
--- End quote ---
I have a swappable control panel ( soon to be modular woo-hoo ) and I used Molex connectors.
Easy to crimp and connect together.
Brad Lee:
BigMoe, thanks.. I, uh, "bought" them at work, I work for a phone company, that's also where the big white jumper block came from
If youre interested, PM me and I can get some(ie 3 male and a female, or 2 females and a male, or any mix), this goes for anyone really
The wires are 24(maybe 26?) awg, a little thin for some peoples liking around here, but Ive had no problems- strip twice as much as you need for the conenctor and jsut double it over to thicken up the end
Homebrew:
Here's a thought. This really applies to those who use hagstrom breakout boards, but anyone could use it. What about using the connectors that come on removable hard drive bays. I have no idea what the part#'s or names are, but you could easily just strip them of a removable hard drive bay. You can get bays pretty cheap these days anyway. I use breakout boxes myself, so i just may give this a whirl.
-Kevin
TheTick:
The last company I worked at sold more than 3 different kinds of removable drive bays. All the cheapo brands used Centronics connectors without the side clasps (the kind that used to be on printers).
They are pretty snug when connected together.