Anyone any good at soldering? Quick earth/ground question…
I want to solder 4-16 arcade buttons together. As they can all share a common ground/earth I figured I could daisy chain each button’s ground connection in series (rather than give each button its own individual wire connection to ground).
What’s the best way to solder the ground wires across each terminal? Is it better to cut lots of separate wires and then solder each one across to each terminal (so that each ground terminal requires two wires) or is there an easier way? (possibly using shrink wrap and one long uncut wire).
A long piece of “bare” wire will work.
As long as all the “hot” wires near it are isolated, then it shouldn’t be a problem.
As a general rule of thumb (which is also nicely applied to circuit boards) is that fixed wires, wires that can’t move around as the chassis does, are OK to be kept un-isolated.
The exception to this is, of course, wires carrying audio signals and other highly-sensitive signals.
so how would I isolate the hot wire if it isn’t ‘protected’? Can I apply heat shrink wrap tubing on to it once it’s soldered? Is that even possible? (all the shrink tube stuff I’ve seen needs to be put on the wire before its soldered…)
I might just cut lots of smaller wires for each connection and then twist each 2 wires together and solder it as if it were 1 wire… if that makes sense…
project is going well - gonna keep this one on the down-low for now… don’t like posting about projects until they’re nearly finished - it increases the chances of actually finishing it…
From a well experienced background in electronics i highly recommend using heat shrink instead of any tape or glue etc etc. Yes they do the same job but can cause problems at a much, much later date.
I’ve always gone with 2 wires per ground point. I wouldn’t say my soldering skills are anything amazing, but I’ve never had anything not work. (After debugging for hours.)
okay, so I’m trying to come up with a way to create a ‘modular’ ground harness so that I can plug and unplug it from the pots/buttons easily. I don’t mind soldering/crimping the connectors on but the earth/+5 needs to be removable.
So I was thinking instead of daisy chaining the wires, I could give each pot/button its own ground wire and then electrically connect them altogether to create just one wire that connects to the ground terminal on my midi controller pcb, like this:
^^^ Picture above shows the earth and the +5v wires connected to 4 pots.
Since I’m not savvy with all the electrical terminology, I can’t google for the type of connector that I need. I think I need something like this:
^^^ I was thinking you could just stuff, say 10 wires, in to one end and 1 wire at the other end and then crimp it. Or perhaps something like this:
^^^ Each of the 10 wires go in one end and then the other end would have tiny little wires to connect each terminal together followed by 1 wire at the end to connect to the ground/earth.
Is there any other way to do this? I’m looking for the cleanest, most modular and efficient way… thoughts?
