Getting the wiring harness in place

After many days of soldering, testing connections, cursing, removing solder, and resoldering, I finally have a wiring junction capable of handling all the connections I need.

One of the most difficult parts of this project so far has been all the electronic work I’ve had to muddle through. The midi converter board itself has 16 channels. These come from two ten wire leads that come out of the board, each ribbon with a single ground and 5v lead. The problem is that every signal wire that is not used has to be grounded, necessitating a “power bar” and a “ground bar” that every signal wire can share. In the picture, you can see the wiring junction in the foreground that connects to the two grey ten ribbon cables. I have soldered ten pin female connectors to a small PCB, and then created a circuit so that I could attach all the necessary wires easily to the junction board. This has made it much easier to test and “debug” the wiring that I have done. And I’ve needed to do a lot of debugging! I found one of the signal leads (wire 12!) is actually very noisy. Despite every effort I’ve tried to clean up the solder job, change wires, change contact points, I can’t seem to get it to stay level. So, I’ve had to disable it in software. I’ll still have 15 clean signal wires to choose from, so there’s no problem there.

From here, I’m moving on running the cable that the sensors will use and testing that. I’ll put up more info shortly….