Competition port Wiring diagram

[DanL]

eek, you guys fried your OI? That sucks =/

I build a dongle this year myself, but I didn't think it was so bad. Like computhief said, though, you have to test connections. Most multimeters have an option to test if current can flow between the two probes - if it can, the thing usually beeps. When working with a $1000 piece of equipment, it IS important to test your connections. Here are some more tips I learned from making mine

• You need to use a DB15 connector for this, and the easiest type is a solder-cup connector. It's very easy to do sloppy soldering and have some solder slip between two cups, creating a short circuit. Test for connectivity between adjacent cups that you worked on. If the thing beeps, take an exacto knife or desoldering thread and get the solder out of there. Short circuits are bad.
• Download the IFI wiring diagram and print it out, or if you want to do something creative, make a wiring diagram and have it in front of you. Things are NEVER as simple as they seem, and although this seems very simple, a wiring diagram's going to prevent you from soldering the wrong wire to the wrong pin.
• CAT5 cabling is very helpful for this. In a CAT5 cable, there are eight 22-24 guage wires, each a different color. Different colors help A LOT in organization (i.e. label on the wiring diagram which wire is to be what color). Stay consistant throughout the diagram - something like for each circuit, make the solid-color wire go from the pin to the switch, and make that same color but color-stripe wire go to ground (CAT5 wires are green, green/white, blue, blue/white, orange, orange/white, brown, and brown/white - do something like blue goes from pin X to the switch and blue/white goes from the switch to your common ground). If you're making a box-type of dongle (see my dongle below), CAT5 cabling is also very helpful because inside the box, you can have the individual wires go wherever you want, while outside the box, it's just one cable.
• Test the pins. I said this before, but I'll say it again. Would you rather spend five minutes putting multimeter probes into the different pins, or spend $1000 getting a new OI?

Compared to other electrical things we'll all do later, wiring this dongle is pretty simple. The key is to pay attention to what you're doing, and if you do make a mistake, take an exacto knife and get the solder out of there or just break the solder connection. With the help of one of our mentors, I even got a bit creative with my dongle. I threw in a battery, some resistors, some diodes, and some LED's. The result was that there's an LED for the auto vs. manual mode and a nice bright red LED for the disable button. If anyone wants my wiring diagram for this, I'll try and find it or make a new one.

My dongle:http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/at...&postid=135152