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| What's the recommended wire gauge for Control Panel wiring? |
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| Cakemeister:
Personally I would use 20 gauge instead of 22 because it is more mistake tolerant, you don't have to have as good a strip or a crimp. But the wiki recommends 18 for the ground loop and 22 for the rest. |
| fjl:
I wouldn't go with Solid. I tried Cat5e on a Joystick I made and for some reason the controls where acting wacky. I press two buttons and three buttons would register. I press up and button 1 and button 4 would register. Weird stuff like that. I figure the frequency signals where being inducted into the other wires causing extra buttons to register. This didn't happen when I separated the wires. Only when they where bundled. I fixed it by shortening the wires a lot and spreading them. Perhaps a cause of skin effect on solid wire. Of course I figure this also had to do with the gamepad I was hacking. The I-pac 4 doesn't have that problem and I used really long strands of Cat5 for it. I say go for stranded. |
| paulscade:
That's weird efjayel. I wonder if it had to do more with the pairs being twisted in the Ethernet cable (not solid vs stranded). Has anyone else seen this? I'd hate to use jacketed Ethernet cable (i.e. leave outer jacket on and wires twisted) and find that I have to rewire later. I'm starting to shift my thinking... those rolls of stranded 20 gauge are looking better and better. |
| deadsoulz:
I just did one with all Cat-5E and 18Gauge for the ground loop. Works great so far. |
| MonMotha:
Stranded 22AWG seems to be what all the major manufacturers use, and it's what I use. Bends easily; doesn't break, and it's the perfect size to easily crimp into just about any kind of crimp terminal. You don't need to oversize your ground bus unless you're also powering things off of it. Most games use 1mA at most for the switch signals, so 22AWG is just fine. If you're also using that ground bus for powering things like lights (I usually run separate dedicated bus if possible for various reasons), then you will want to upsize your ground to the same size as your power wire for the lights. I usually use 18AWG (still stranded) for this, though 22AWG is perfectly sufficient to run several lamps, especially with dedicated ground busses for power and signals. |
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