As someone who works in R&D in software/electronics, I can say I do this kind of thing regularly.
with Dupond I guess? Because this is weird here
Not specifically with a DE15 (for that I’d just chop up an old VGA cable), but I work with a lot of proprietary connectors. Some of the connectors are scarce, and sometimes we just wire them manually if the work isn’t too extensive.
I once took a really crappy RS232 cable to India as part of some equipment to train our remote developers. The cable barely worked in our lab in the States. I told our hardware engineer that it wasn’t going to work in India, and I was right. So in India I ended up having to wrap the entire wire bundle in a wire that I soldered to ground on both sides. Soldered it together with a plumbing soldering iron. I am a software engineer, but I have an electrical engineering degree. The VP that I was traveling with couldn’t believe that the crap I made worked. Realistically, I couldn’t either.
India loves this barely working lifehacks known as “Juugad”
This looks like it is technology that I should borrow for use in Texas. Love it.
Okay, don’t get me wrong I’m impressed and I also enjoy macgyvering things like that… But if it’s for a work thing, surely it can’t be that hard to go out and buy a new cable from any old shop nearby? I would think the cable is common enough to still be in stock in a lot of places, even if it’s ancient.
This was a proprietary cable specific to our board design. Believe me, I wish we could have used a standard cable.
I built an RS232 cable from parts from RadioShack 25 years ago, with no soldering, just electrical tape. It’s surprisingly easy if you don’t need speed. Mine capped out at 1200 or 2400 baud. Was it good? No. Did it work? Absolutely.
Yeah, the protocol itself is pretty robust. The cable I had didn’t have enough noise immunity for the dirty power the building had in India (afternoon brown outs when the voltage dipped when the air conditioners ran). The Faraday cage that I made around the cable helped with the noise and also (and I believe more crucially though I had no scope to confirm) gave the two boards a common ground. I had a little trouble with before I left, but it didn’t work at all in India until I modded it. Made the hardware engineer buy me a beer when I got back.
Unshielded wire in a guitar amplifier be like: “Ayo, how is everybody doing, let’s go and MAKE SOME NOOOOOOISE!”
Your phone is about to ring
One time as a kid, I got myself in trouble and I got TV taken away from me - my dad came up to my room with a pair of scissors and just cut my coax cable. I stripped that bad boy and shoved the end back in to my TV, worked a treat. I also had my wifi antenna from my desktop taken from me at some point, so I took a paper clip and stuck it in there - not GREAT reception, but it was good enough!
I’ve done some very dodgy things with VGA cables in an effort to route the cables through narrow bulkheads. For normal computer-to-monitor-lengths this is probably fine.
I haven’t noticed much signal degradation below 4m-ish.
At 12m, you better solder properly and wrap some extra shielding around your splice.
Source: I’ve ran plenty of VGA cables between bridge computers and a deck monitor on ships.
This reminds me of a mod around the time of the TI-83 ish , where you had solder diodes to a cable connecting two devices.
mhmm mhm yerp I know what this means mmmhhhmmmm yes much TI-83 solder diode mhm!
Uh
indubitably, yes
Glares at high-speed DAQ electronics and high-frequency analogue sensing circuits
PCB cries in EMI
Regular circuits: “What’s that? You want to hack me together with a breadboard from 1963 and a hodgepodge of old telecom wire and misc parts? Sure, sounds great!”
DSP circuits: “Being more than 2mm from the IC makes me feel icky :(”
Where’s my emotional support coupling capacitor? I can’t function without my emotional support coupling capacitor!
Hand drawn PCBs from the 60s: look at my beautiful curved tracks, don’t they just accentuate my thick copper fills?
Any PCB since Gerber: you’ll take my 45 degrees and like it!
This image triggers me so much, but mostly because it is truer than I want to admit.
I made a composite cable for my Sega megadrive by splicing an RCA cable with two pieces of a thick paperclip. Worked great. I just had to remember which were the two holes to stick it in
Same goes for processor “baking”. You can just use a soldering iron and some wires
Big Cable is the one generating all the noise to begin with!
those are used syringes found in a 1980s Soviet medical facility.
