[Eldarion]

Originally Posted by ECarlson

I'd love to see a photo of your board. I hope you can take some photos and post them.

One of my earlier design plans included a right-angle PC-board mount D-sub connector for the joystick, and a regular round cable and D-sub for the OI connection, but neither of those would have worked well with the pre-drilled boards we used. So that design restriction forced me to come up with the ribbon cable design, which I like a lot. My design ideas and plans went through many iterations before the board reached the form it is in now.

Among other things, I originally thought I was going to put some type of connector on each switch and pott, then I realized that was totally unnecessary, and would create unnecessary work later to prepare the switches and potts. Then I was going to use screw-terminal blocks, but that would require a screwdriver to use, and screws can loosen. Then I decided on the spring connector blocks, because they don't require tools, and they don't loosen.

Thanks for the tips on making PC boards. That could come in handy.

We thought about making our own PC boards, but it would require lots of jumper wires to achieve a single-sided design, and a double-sided design is a lot harder to do by hand. Also, there would have been 120 holes to drill in each board to mount all the parts (now down to 112 holes, with the removal of the LEDs, but still a lot of precision drilling).

Can't you just use a CNC mill with an itty-bitty drill bit?