Hi community,
Hi all, I am building a custom case for an arcade machine (kind of a secret project) and the original cabinet was very bulky and I decided to scrap it and build my own minimal case for it.
I am very enthusiastic about designing and building cases for an old machine. I know how to do electrical wiring and stuffs but I have practically 0 knowledge about circuit designing and IC chips. I ran into this situation where with my existing knowledge I cannot figure out:
The rebuilt machine consist of 2 parts in my plan:
- the Main Body with directional controls, some buttons and a converted Laptop monitor.
Inside the main body is an ITX computer and the original IO Board for the machine.
Mains power will be connected to an ATX Power Supply to supply power to the motherboard and the IO Board. I will probably just take a 12V output from the ATX PSU to power the LCD too (if I happen to be able to convert the CFL bulbs in the LCD to LED lights).
All buttons, lights and other features are built into the main body and the cables will be hidden from sight.
- and the "gameplay" input and here comes the problem:
- The input panel originally had a 20pin ribbon cable running from the panel to the IO Board. Since now the panel and the IO Board is not in the same big cabinet I have to run some kind of connection between the two. I originally decided to run a thick cable and attach some kind of DB connector to both ends but after some research online there IS 20 core (20 wire?) cable in the market and but the cable was just too thick and kind of ugly.
I imagine that there should be some solutions to running all 20 pins signal without using all 20 wires (like a encoder and decoder / multiplexing?). I hope someone out here can help me and guide me through how to avoid the 20 wire connection. My ultimate goal is to run a wireless connection of some kind but...yeah it's just too much of a stretch for me, I have very little knowledge in doing these kinds of designing.
Thanks for all your help!
Polar Wong