My team is trying to wire our RS7 Encoder to the Talon SRX data port. The most obvious path seems to be solder wires to the RS7 then run those wires to an SRX breakout board and a data cable to the SRX.
This is a very short run (right next to each other) so I think we could clip an end off the SRX data cable and wire that directly to the RS7. Is there a problem with this I am not seeing? Is it easy/easier? What would you recommend?
We’ve done this before and the biggest problem we had was the size of the individual wires of the ribbon cable. Since they’re so small, it was difficult to strip the insulation off (our wire strippers don’t go down to 30AWG). On top of that, we were worried that the wire would break off the solder joint. We ended up having two layers of shrink tube; one for the individual wires, then another to group them all together. Make sure that the wire won’t be moving a lot, and make spares.
Looking at the Talon SRX User’s Guide, page 19 shows the pinout for connecting a quadrature encoder. On the actual SRX data cable, the red wire should connect to pin 1.
We did a couple RS7 encoders directly to a ribbon cable as well back in 2016. It is difficult. We used a razor blade to cut the insulation off of one side of the ribbon, then pulled out the correct conductors, then directly soldered those to the board (dont forget to trim under the board so it doesn’t hit the magnet holder). Lastly we hot glued from the board to the good part of the ribbon cable covering all the exposed copper and providing additional strain relief.
Hope this helps!
We strongly recommend not wiring anything directly to the individual wires of the ribbon cable.
The size of these wires makes this a high-risk point of failure - there are breakout boards for a reason.
If you’re worried about size, the encoder and analog breakout boards that we make were intended to be wired, connected, and heat-shrunk so that you have one continuous cable.