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Soldering/splicing wires sucks
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unclet:
Whenever I want to solder two wires together I use painterstape (ie: blue tape) to hold the wires down to a piece of scrap wood.  I line up the wires before taping to ends of the wires are touching each other.  I then use my soldering iron and solder the ends together.  Works great for me.  I can set up about 4 to 5 sets of wires at one time and then solder each pair quickly.
shmokes:
I'll have to remember that.  That would have been handy.
shmokes:
Grrr  . . . something's not working right after all.

The wheel (a Logitech Momo Force) works fine with the power unplugged (no force feedback, of course), but goes nuts like every button on it is being pressed simultaneously with the power plugged in.  I toned everything out, and I know there are no shorts, but I'm afraid that with 24v of electricity running down the wires I'm now getting crosstalk in the cable.  And to make matters worse, my only multimeter is a crappy little pocket thing from radio shack that runs on watch batteries, and the batteries just went dead.   :banghead:

Ugh . . . I have visions of this turning into a nightmare to fix.  And just when I thought I was in the clear.

edit: Hmm . . . I just looked up info on Power Over Ethernet, and it's spec'd for 48+v and much higher amperage than my power brick is giving.  I have a couple points in the cable where pairs were untwisted for splicing.  Maybe that's where the crosstalk is occurring.  Or maybe it's not crosstalk at all, but some other problem.  I haven't used the wheel in a couple years.  It's just been stored, waiting for me to start working on my cab again.  But it worked fine the last time I used it a couple years ago..

 
shmokes:
I'm trying to decide what to do here.  I can't think of anything other than crosstalk that could be causing this problem.  I really wanted to use the Ethernet port, but I'm just not sure that it's going to work now.  Can anyone recommend another way to lengthen the cord running between my wheel and pedals?  I chose to splice it to an Ethernet patch cable and jack because I need the cable to have a break in the middle of it so I can feed the cable through an opening not a whole lot bigger than an RJ45 connector.  And it won't be permanently installed once it's in, so I can't just cut it, feed it, and then make a permanent splice.  I need some kind of connector in between.

The original cable is permanently attached to the pedal base, and connects to the steering well with a DB25 connector (way too big to feed through the opening).  It consists of six wires, four of which are 26 gauge, and two are 22, or possibly 20 gauge.
patrickl:
Are you sure about the cat5 cable being able to take the load? These wires are awfully thin. If the original power wires were 20 gauge, it could carry 3 times the load of your 24 gauge cat5 wires. I'd say at best you'd get 1 amp at 12V over a single cat 5 wire

If the original cable contains only 6 wires, you could double up the wires used for power in the cat5 cable.

Do you really think crosstalk is the problem? I thought that was only a problem when you want to rush a high speed digital signal across the line. For the crude signals of a steering wheel this shouldn't be a problem should it? Or is there a USB signal going over the cable or something?

I guess you could try routing the power over a separate cable, but that would mean a lot of soldering again and a pretty ugly result too.
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