question about daisy chaining/grounding please help

[rlemmon]

Hi. I get that you take  a wire from your i pac's grnd terminal and take it to the first buttons' com blade and then take another wire from that blade to the next buttons com blade and so on.  I have three quick questions.

1. Do you also dasiychain everthing to your joystick

2. When you get to you last button ( or joystick switch) Is it necessary to  run a wire back to the ground terminal on the i PAC were you started ?

3. Say I was building a 2 player panel ( I'm not) is that why theres rows of terminals on the I PAC. I'm guessing one reason is  that you couldn't ground both sticks to gather or they wouldn't work right ?
Thanks.

[Kremmit]

You can ground everything together, as long as they're being run through the same encoder.  You wouldn't want to ground a button from an IPac to the ground lead on an Opti-Wiz, though- each encoder needs it's own ground.

No, you don't have to run a line back to ground when you reach the end of the chain.  One wire is all it takes.

Even though you can ground everyting together, you may find it's easier not to, though.  Say you're doing a 2-player panel.. You may prefer to ground everything on the right hand side together, and run a line back to your IPac's ground, and then do the same for everything on the left hand side.  This would result in two lines going to the Ipac, which is OK.

You also don't have to make a straight chain, from one to the next each time.  You can do more of a star if you want, where several lines all go back to the same point.  Basically, any arrangement that gives a path back to the grond terminal is good.

[shardian]

I believe the added benefit of connecting the first and last buttons to the ground terminal is the loop created. If one button has a loose ground in a loop, all the other ones will still work. If you just have a line, then when one button goes bad, every button after it in the line will also not work.

[Witchboard]

I believe the added benefit of connecting the first and last buttons to the ground terminal is the loop created. If one button has a loose ground in a loop, all the other ones will still work. If you just have a line, then when one button goes bad, every button after it in the line will also not work.

Yeah, makes it easy to troubleshoot. 

[Kremmit]

I believe the added benefit of connecting the first and last buttons to the ground terminal is the loop created. If one button has a loose ground in a loop, all the other ones will still work. If you just have a line, then when one button goes bad, every button after it in the line will also not work.

Yeah, makes it easy to troubleshoot. 

That's why, on the last 2-player panel I wired, I actually ran 4 separate ground leads:  one from each of the sticks, and one from each set of player buttons.  If I have a ground problem, it'll be obvious where it is.