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Connectors: A History of Their Technology?
dpbsmith asks: "It seems like a simple engineering problem--construct a device for easily and safely connecting several dozen wires at the same time--but the variety and creativity in their design over the years has been amazing, and, clearly there have been trends, fashions, and styles. In the fifties and sixties, virtually all connectors were roughly similar to the D-Sub design used for RS-232. A stiff, straight pin engaged a springy socket that contacted and bore against it on all sides. There were minor variations in shape and placement; the Amphenol Blue Ribbons (think Centronics), the connectors into which circuit boards engaged, but they were all variations on a theme. I was absolutely astounded the first time I saw a modular RJ-11 connector. Cheap, effective, and utterly unlike anything I'd ever seen before. Who invented these? Western Electric? Recently, we have the USB connector and the Firewire connector, obviously members of the same family (and a cheap-and-cheesy-seeming family it seems); on the other hand, my telephone and my digital camera have connectors that are very small and snap in with a positive lock that must be released with a squeeze, obviously yet another fundamentally different design. What do people know about the design, history, and engineering behind connectors over the years? Is it all hidden away, trade secrets of the connector companies, or is their a story that can be told?"
If we're talking about connecters, we should take time to ponder the mystery of BNC connecters, their origins, and what the hell BNC stands for anyways!
"I hope they legalize drugs so you hurry up and fucking die." Charles Bronson (the band, not the man)
Connector fetishist detected. =)
I don't know exactly who invented manifold connectors, but it was probably someone who got tired of using his fingers as conductors.
Calm down, it's *only* ones and zeroes.
Is it me, or does anyone feel like this article was just begging for immature teenager trolls?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Or the poorly designed IDE cables and connectors...
I'm never going to achieve Nirvana with my Karma
You can find more info in the Cable FAQ through Google.
what would we do with out that locking thing on RJ-45 or RJ-11 cables???
Ben Brown obviously likes big connectors http://www.benbrown.com/switch/
One of the coolest things about connectors is that the Atari 2600, C64 and Sega Genesis all had the same 9-pin connector. You can hook a Genesis pad up to your 2600 and it works well (B is the only button that works, along with the D-pad). There's even a hack for making the Genesis pad work with the two-button 7800 -- sadly I can't find the link atm. Coolest thing I've seen recently is a converter that lets you use PlayStation dual-analog controllers on the Atari 5200. I believe I saw something about it here.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
He looked at me funny, bomb his country to glass.
I was six when i first heard of the term "male" and "female" connectors. Even though I keep pestering my dad about
1) which one is male / female, and
2) why they name it something stupid like that
he just kept "umm... ahhh"-ing and never answered.
I was like 17 when it finally dawned on me why they named it that way. ha! then it all made sense.
moral of the story are:
a) who says electrical engineers / connector designers are not perverted?
b) to save yourself trouble, don't talk about male/femail connectors in front of little kids.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Perhaps they should rename themselves "Packard Dell."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Talking about connectors, one thing that really mades me mad is the amount of power supply adapters we have to have these days. My office floor is littered with them, for net routers, printer, laptops, displays, mobiles etc. etc. Why can't we have two circuits? And for that matter, why are electric plugs so big. In the UK the are enormous. Many things these days only take a tiny bit of power - can't we have smaller electrical plugs? On my travels it seems that in the rest of the world electrical plugs are pretty big too. Is there anywhere with little dainty ones and without huge power adapters? Japan perhaps?
Our president is a crook. Let's get into our expensive flying toy that cost millions at the expense of welfare, medicaid and education and throw bombs that cost as much as a sports car at foreign weddings. Dur.
Miniaturizing transformers is really expensive - having those devices come with smaller transformer would noticably add to the price of the device.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It's almost a year since the Saudi's we paid to blow up our city did the deed. Let's start a new war, no one's paying us any attention.
i do...i find this really interesting..it may be simple but we use them everyday, and with out them our cables would just fall out.
dont mind me im on crack
Yeah, the pornographic nature of electrical connectors is pretty strange and amusing. One wonder how the bluenoses let this happen!
Another example: joystick. These were originally invented for high-accelleration aircraft, where the pilot was subjected to G-forces that prevented him (it was always a him, of course) from lifting his hands out of his lap. So they invented a flight control that consisted of a simple stick between the pilots legs. The masturbation metaphor was unavoidable, but where were the censors when all this was a happening? This was the 1950s and America was overrun with Guadians of Virtue. I guess the only answer is that GoVs are just plain dense!
It might be easier if we switched from 60Hz to something around 20kHz.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It might be easier if we switched from 60Hz to something around 20kHz.
You want to overclock the power lines?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I understand that we all all geeks here, but you didn't get it until 17?
I think I was 28 when I figured out you're not supposed to put a rubber on the male connecter and now I'm starting to suspect the lube isn't such a good idea either. The damn things just keep poppin' off...
I've spent many unhappy hours trying to get the IDE cables from the interfaces on the motherboard to the disk 18.1 inches away :(
Personally, my favorite connector has to be the Camlok E-series power connector. There is just something "interesting" about a connector that is rated for 400+ amps of current flow. And just TRY to break one or pull it off the wire...
For multipin, I would have to say that the old IBM Latchback connectors are tops on my list. 240+ pins, all designed to mate at the same time, all gold plated, and designed for low level signals (unamplified audio for example). Single cam based latching mechanism, keyed, and easily maintainable.
Of course, if you have never work in a concert hall, you probably will NEVER see any of these connectors in real life....
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
The best connectors, bar none, are the USB/FireWire connectors. Small and cheap but not flimsy, easy to insert and remove (little pressure), but good retention, nearly impossible to break under normal circumstances, capable of carrying power, no stupid retention clip, compact but not tiny...
In north america, it seems that all computer power cords are standardized. I don't mean the standard electrical plug. But the "other" end of the cord. Whether it plugs into a calculator, adding machine, comptuer, monitor, or some other types of equipment.
It has a standard sized six sided shape with three holes for metal prongs to fit into.
Perhaps, you've seen a cord with a connector that is the opposite gender of these. It might, for example, but a cord comming out of a monitor with a connector that accepts a standard computer power cord.
This cord has metal prongs (male?) but a sheath around the prongs into which the bulk of the plug from the other end fits (femals?).
If you know the kind of connector I'm talking about, then why can't electrical power plugs work like this?
At present, electrical plugs have metal prongs that can be touched with your fingers while the plug is partially inserted into the electrical outlet. What if there were a plastic "fence" around the group of prongs so that it was impossible to touch the prongs while it is being inserted into an outlet? The outlet would have to have the "cutout" for this plastic fence to fit into.
Anyone who has plugged an Apple monitor's electrical cord into the Mac so that the Mac controls the flow of power to the monitor knows what I'm talking about here. It is impossible to touch the prongs while you're inserting the plug into the socket.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
With the recent 802.11b Wifi craze I'm surprised anyone hasn't mentioned the RP-TNC connectors that appear at the back of the popular Linksys WAP11.
They have proved very hard to find, and expensive to order. The connector or adapter cable often prove to be the most expensive part of a homebrew antenna!
Does anyone have any antenna / RF cable tips or know of stores in the SF bay area?
I love connectors. I love sticking wires into a DB25 to make my TI82 talk to my PC. I love crimping RJ45's (nothing beats that satisfying perfect crimp). I love squishing down a 50 pin IDC with a pair of visegrips (or a vise, if I'm lucky :)). Maybe it sounds trivial, but there's just something about connectors and interfaces that makes me smile. Yes, I am insane.
Might as well plug my favorite DC power connectors, Andersen Powerpoles Modular, color-coded, genderless, super-easy to assemble, safe, positive click on connect, etc. Emergency services are quickly adopting them as the standard for all 13.8v (12v nominal) gear for their setups. Perhaps a few cents more than the cheap barrel connectors or Molexes, but they're definitely worth it. I've driven over 12-year-old Powerpole connectors and they're none the worse for wear.
(no connection between me and andersen besides happy customer status, btw.)
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Fahnestock made the clip.
And it was good.
--Blair
"Bring back the B-Cell."
I'm always impressed by the connectors for peripherals (generally controllers) on modern video-game consoles. Consider, if you will, the humble playstation connector:
If only connectors for "grownups" were designed this way.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
BNC stands for Bayonet N Connector.
And male panel connectors are called jacks, too.
Male/Female refers to the contact type.
Plug/Jack refers to movable/fixed. The more movable connector (eg, on the end of a cable) is a plug, and the less movable connector (eg, on a panel) is a jack. This is covered in the ANSI standard for reference designators.
Can anyone think of a crappier design than SCART??!
The USB mechanical spec calls out that the USB logo be molded on one side of the cable in such a way that you can feel it and the other side be smooth. The logo is specified to go up.
:-(
And all was good.
Until manufacturers could save $0.02 by putting their jacks on upside down or sideways. Now you have a bunch of nicely polarized cables that you can orient blindly in the mess of cables, but have no idea which way the jack is oriented.
(Yes, I have an upside down computer from a vendor that knows better and screwed me for $0.02.)
Yes I'm sure there's a Bulgarian Nympho Club, but thats beside the point.
I just checked on google. No Bulgarian Nympho Club. At least not on the web. Damn. I just posted to tell everyone to not get their priceline tickets to Bulgaria just yet.
Medical Ultrasound systems have a unique connector problem. An ultrasound probe has to connect to the ultrasound machine, but there are a huge number of signals that must get transmitted. The traditional ultrasound probe has a connector that looks like a huge 2" by 5" RS-232 plug with up to 256 pins (more in some cases).
To prevent constant pin breakage and bending, most ultrasound machines have special guides on the ports (jacks) so that the plug can only be inserted at a precise angle. But it still happens. When you've paid up to $50,000 for an infant cardiac transesophogeal multiplanar probe and you break a half-cent pin, you tend utter words that should not be uttered near an infant needing such a diagnostic examination.
Acuson invented a new type of connector for their Sequoia line of ultrasound systems. The "MP" connector is a flat plate that rests snuggly against another flat plate in the port, held secure by a quick release knob. Imagine a very large inkjet cartridge connector. Unlike an inkjet connector, they're very rugged, and spec'ed out a heck of lot tighter. No more broken pins! And they're a lot easier to attach and detach than the old style.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The crufty among us will remember the ultimate minimalist connector. The original ethernet (thick wire) used a large coax cable as the backbone. You connected to it by drilling a tiny hole and inserting your tap into the cable in such a way that it made contact to the core and shield without shorting anything and wiping out the whole network.
:-)
It really made 50ohm BNC look good when it came out.
Back in 1968 or so working at Xerox Data Systems (old mainframe mfgr -- remember them?) it looked like Amphenol owned the business. They must have a lot of history at their site, when it's up (crasho this morning -- check Google's cache). IEEE magazine was mostly funded by Amphenol ads, it looked like. Been around a while.
Its always amazed me how computer power cables (the ones that go from the wall to power supply) are engineered so perfectly.
If they didn't have that black block of plastic with female connectors and instead used male connectors, imagine the weapon possibilities!
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
I work with computers. A lot.
One of the things that makes my job difficult is connectors which rely solely on friction to maintain contact. I'm talking about connectors such as where the external power lead connects to your computer, and the 5.25" +/-(5/12)V connectors for hard drives and the like.
The mains connectors have a habit of just falling out of the back of computers and monitors. The number of times I have had to troubleshoot someone's monitor only to find the power cable was semi-attached is staggering.
And those little 5.25" drive connectors either fall out or are jammed in so tight that they're the devil to pull out again and I wind up knocking my hand on the adjacent video card. Those things can be quite sharp.
I have seen a few PCs that have a metal 'gate' on the back, which clicks into place over the AC power plug. This I like.
I'd love to see more sensible connectors in PCs such as the 3.5" drive connectors which seem like a good idea, or even the spring-loaded squeeze-the-sides connectors you see on some modern HP printers.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Look in your basement, at where your washer and dryer are plugged in. Very different.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
While I don't have enough comments to justify a properly structured reply, I would like to comment on two of them.
regarding video: BNC is *easy*. Slip it in, lock it, done. I've had plenty of VGA ports I couldn't get plugged in properly.
regarding internal drive power: I've had plenty of these that I couldn't unplug without a great deal of effort, and I had one just a couple of days ago fall apart when I was trying to unplug it.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
I think what the world really needs is asexual connectors, connectors where there is only one gender. Obviously these wouldn't be good for power or probably for most data purposes either, but it would be a godsend for audio connectors and would work well for phones too (but I doubt the phone company would ever change their standard jacks). I have to say, out of all the connectors BNC connectors are my favorite because they click in easily and solidly. The problem is that they can only be used with two conductor cables. The cable companies really should switch to BNC connectors instead of F connectors because F connectors are not easy to get on or off and have a very fiddly center conductor.
Ever heard of a balun? This is one of the stupidest ideas I've seen. Basically, where I go to school (CMU), you can't plug in your RJ-45 ethernet cable into the wall without using this special balun adapter. Seems like some proprietary IBM design. Can anyone clarify this?
SIGSIG -- signature too long (core dumped)
Recently, we have the USB connector and the Firewire connector, obviously members of the same family (and a cheap-and-cheesy-seeming family it seems); on the other hand, my telephone and my digital camera have connectors that are very small and snap in with a positive lock that must be released with a squeeze, obviously yet another fundamentally different design.
I think this is a great part of the USB and Firewire designs. If something is yanking too hard on the cord, I'd rather have the plug pop out than break. I wish for this feature every time my roommates trip over the 25 foot Ethernet cable to my laptop.
Normal Type N connectors screw on, BNCs have the little twist-lock bayonet-type lugs. Real BNC connectors are the size of N connectors, you're probably referring to the miniature BNC connectors everybody uses on scopes and for old ethernet. Full-size BNCs are goofy-looking things. Tiny N Connectors (TNC) are about the same size as the mini BNCs, only they screw on like regular N connectors. And the military named N connectors, they're what was invented after the type M and before the type O. Really. SMA connectors are a variant of the original Type M connector - Subminiature M rev A (and then there's SMB and SMC connectors in that family).
Teflon RCA phono connectors for audio are good to 1.2GHz, but the best "UHF" connectors (PL-259) don't work well at all for UHF. Motorola's "Mini-UHF" connector was a solution for a problem that didn't exist... they could have (should have) used TNCs instead of making up yet another new "standard" RF connector.
Cable TV uses Type F connectors, and there's a world of difference between alligator clips and crocodile clips. And then there's Fahnstock connectors... the world of electronics has been blessed with a lot of innovative people, each with a better way to reinvent the wheel.
Take a look at it one day. The pins have an interesting half twist to them, so they screw into the female side. Very nice.
Anyone else absolutely hate the PS2 mouse/keyboard connector, I have bent/broken countless trying to plug in one of these into the back of a computer which is shoved in some ungodly angle
Perhaps a more interesting question is: Why are those power adapters you plug into the wall designed so that it's physically impossible to plug another identical one into the plug-next-door...
Every single cheap modem, scanner, camera, gadget or widget seems to believe that they'll be the only plug in the power board... Aagh!
Connecters are interesting enough (in a VERY strange way), but what I really find interesting are adapters. Especialy for something that you would think is standard like SCSIE. I bought a SCSIE slide scanner thinking it is OK I have a card and a spare cable but no, the back of the device had some strange connecters 2 completely different ones that were also different to the wire that I had. That makes 3 connecters for external SCSIE (that I know of). In the end I had to hunt round Tandy (US read Raidoshack) for an adapter which cost £20. Is there a conspiracy by the cable makers to put as many different types of connecter out there as they can so they can rake in the money selling adapters to unsuspecting Geeks??
Anyone familiar with the SC fiber optic connector? Very cool design. You push it in, and it locks, and to remove it, you pull on the sleeve and it unlatches itself. A very simple, ingenious design.
The USB mechanical spec calls out that the USB logo be molded on one side of the cable in such a way that you can feel it and the other side be smooth.
That's a great idea, but it seems no one follows the spec. I just checked all four USB devices I use (trackball, digital camera, ZIP drive, and scanner)--all have the USB logo on one side, but none have a smooth down side. Two have a textured bottom, one has some sort of model code, and one has "Made in China" molded into it.
Fumbling in the darkness behind my desk, my fingers can't tell which side has the USB logo on any of them! It's a shame, there's nothing wrong with the standard, just how manufacturers have implemented it.
Gotta love them - at first they look like a 25-pin serial but on closer inspection they've got 3 little bnc-style connecters and a bunch of control pins :)
This has to do with an air connector.
,the guy also happened to be the biggest jerk I ever worked with- then or since.
A few years back I was serving on active duty in the US Navy. The ship I was on was in drydock for overhaul at the time. We were performing asbetos ripout on a large space so you had to suit up in a tyvek overall suit and breathe via a mask connected to an air supply via a hose. The connecot on the hose was called a quick-disconnect fitting. If you have ever used pressurized air tools you know what I'm talking about. To connect the hose you simply push a hale fitting into the female fitting. To disconnect you just have to lift a small spring-loaded collar and pull the fittings apart.
One night I was standing the6PM-Midnigh watch. On that particular watch you have to go to the command center (EOS -Enclosed Operating Station) and get your logs signed by the Officer on duty. This particular night when I went to go get my logs signed around 1150 PM. The Office asked me to stand in the EOS and wait for him to do a quick inspection of the engineering spaces.
As I waited all the other watchstanders gradually appeared at the EOS to get their logs signed. Naturall, with about ten people milling about in a small space a lot of conversations started up.
Normally most of the watchstanders in the EOS wear headphones to hear the communications in the engineering spaces. Since so many were talking aloud thay all had hung up their headphones with their earpieces pointed outward just in case someone called in.
Time really flew by and before we knew it the time was 12:30 AM and we hadn't heard from the watchofficer. One of the watchstanders picked up a phone and paged him on the loadspeaker through the engineering spaces. Nothing. No reply for almost five minutes. Worried, a coulple of watchstaders began to leave the EOS to look for him.
Suddenly we someone paged me personally via the phones. I picked up a handset to answer the call. I responded and the Officer said," Petty Officer, I'm calling because something rather embarrasing has happened and I know I can trust you to keep this quiet. I went down to the lower level to inspect the asbetos ripout area and hook up to this air thingy and can't seem to get it to disconnect."
The first thing that flashed through my head was that everone in the entire engineering room had just heard his "secret" because of the headphones hanging. Second, this guy has just spent 45 minuted trying to figure out how to disconnect a quick-disconnect fitting. I hit the floor laughing. Master's Degree in Engineering from an Ivy League School, several years of the best technical schooling the US Navy has to offer and this guy can't figure out a quick disconnect fitting.
Needless to say, by the time myself and everyone else recovered we managed to talk him through getting it disconnnected. He never did live that one down. Every newby watchstander would give him a smirk and a knowing look when they had to deal with him face-to-face. BTW
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Its the damn power connecter on the back of most RCA Cable modems. Those things are damn hard to get off. I have thumped my hand many o times trying to get it off.
This is part of the ritual required to change the mac address settings in RCN's cable modem service.
-mlr
To attach them to equipment, you put the connector partway into the hole, turn until it goes in freely, and then shove it in fully (it clicks to lock). To remove it, you pull on the casing of the connector, and it releases smoothly. Sweet design for working in cramped areas where the connector plug isn't visible.
Unfortunately, they are also very expensive.
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Good: I love IBM's hermaphroditic token ring connectors. Who cares which end is plug, and which is device? It's all the same to them. They are awful big though, but it's like RS-232. Simple hardware (over?)engineered to a purpoose, because when these were designed they were not expected to be consumer level items.
Bad: Proprietary unavailable fscking connectors. Zaurus, Palm, Visor, Clie, all different. Thanks guys, 'cause what I really wanted was to pay you for a big box with a ttl-serial level converter and cable that removes my keyboard functionality.
Ugly: If you want ugly, try twinaxe with vampire taps. The connection is made by puncturing the cable with the fangs of the tap. You get all the fragility of BNC ethernet and all the flexibility of a network made out of sticks. I'm probably prejudiced, beause by the time I was using it, I also resented wrestling with SNA for a corporate network where TCP/IP would serve better. Since done.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Oh you mean like the female-male connectors that we'll are familiar with?
I thought it needful to give some respect to the guy who first thought up the sprung-metal contact.
Think about it; from the wall socket your kit's in, to the kettle lead into the psu, to the power cables into the devices, the socket your cpu's in, the connectors on the cards etc - the same basic engineering goes into every point. Sprung copper/brass/gold contacts at every point.
It's the little things that change the world. Praise to those men.
Warning: May contain nuts
Admitadly, you're right: the US power plugs are unsafe and potentially dangerous. It wouldn't even be amazingly difficult to change them to something safer.
However, how many people do you know who have been hurt plugging/unplugging a power cord? I know no one who's been hurt in such a fashion.
How about the connectors you find on circuit boards?
Imagine a female connector on the board that accepts a tiny ribben cable. To disconnect you have to lift up a recessed piece of plastic with your fingernail.
Woa to you if you lift too hard (easy to do). Time to replace the board (expensive).
You will never see them on consumer grade electronics equipment, but they are widely used on military electronics equipment and commercial equipment that has to survive in a hostile environment. They are weatherproof cylindrical multi-pin connectors with a twist-lock collar. They come in a wide variety of sizes and configurations.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The same type of thing's going on all around is with things like seatbelts and cigarettes. :)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
Low cost centres are still making them, EEC just did a recall.
Scrap metal merchants worry about radioactive connectors heading their way, or a navy geek who rediscovered mercury wetting.
Also remember some connectors are designed for tempest, and keeping out emp bursts, salt water entry, hostile environments.
Ask yourself if that nuclear power station down the road is using those nifty rj45 jacks for mission critical control. Its a good question, because wire wrap components now seem extinct - AFAIK the best ever.
The vast majority of the electrical connectors you see are either male of female. They're all built just to mate with its complement, which raises parts storage issues as well as restricts how things can plug into eachother. I got a hold of genderless-mating modular connectors that can snap together in many configurations, and have no concept of 'male' or 'female'. They're apparently made by Anderson Power Products. I have a few pictures of their smaller connectors here. Connectors like these would be GREAT for daisy chaining DC power sources and/or building quick-disconnect battery charging harness, since their design maintains polarity regardless of the "direction" of the connector (supply to supply, battery to battery, battery to supply, etc)
The skin effect is only relevant with frequencies of the order of MHz (or higher).
RE 1/4 audio - this was the standard - the 1/8th is the "Mini" - gos back to the days of manual switchboards - yep, 1/4" audio plugs
BTW properly done line level audio is 600 ohms impedience all through the chain - and is a relic of the phone company - as is "Line Level" - as in telephone line
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Most I'm aware are arranged vaguely like a computer's serial port connector, except that the pins are slightly further apart, and each pin is surrounded by a cylindrical plastic casing (the pin itself is recessed a bit below the end of the cylinder). This way the cylindrical plastic pieces align the connector with the socket before the metal pins actually make contact, making it nearly impossible to bend the pins (which is good when you have kids plugging and unplugging them all the time).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I really like the way the pins in DVI connectors are set up. The pins aren't really "pins'' so to speak; they're actually blades (trade name LFH - Low Force Helix), which are, yes, twisted helically in both port and jack, so when you plug 'em together, they act like springs, pressing against each other without requiring anything else (they just float in space, no plastic shrouds as in DB25 connectors). There's no easy analogy for this that I can readily think of, but it's so well-engineered it's beautiful.
Also, I think Apple's ADC connector- a variant on the DVI design, with a few more pins for power and USB- is a big improvement over VGA- no thumbscrews to twist, just a squeeze-lock mechanism. The cable coming out of the connector can be rotated 90 degrees so you can fit the machine right up against the wall, unlike the stiff VGA connector. Plus, power is built in, which initially I thought would be a bad thing (running a 17" CRT off the Mac's power supply = bad stuff) but now that Apple's gone all flat-panel, it's much more rational. I appreciate this connector each time I have to move my rig. Takes two seconds to plug and unplug.
Wrists killing you? Not in 2 weeks. Learn Dvorak.
I doubt I'll ever have a better opportunity to ask a knowledgeable community...
I have a cheapo halogen desk lamp with its own little power supply brick. The lamp cord that plugs into the brick has developed some sort of internal short; it only works if held at just the right angle. What kind of connector is it? It has a vertical slot-type pin next to a narrow round pin, like this: |*
Anyone know what the name is for this kind of connector so I can then locate a replacement? Thanks!.
If you have a hermaphroditic connector with N pins, how can it be orientation agnostic? There is just one way you can connect.
But there are two ways you can turn a connector 180 degrees for it to mate with one identical to itself: around the axis defined by the pin tips or along an axis perpendicular to that and to the cable itself. In the first case you only need N wires (see the Anderson cable mentioned in nearby posts) but in the second case you need 2N+1 unless you want cross-over.
I tried to explain this to Jef over email, but even with drawings it didn't work out very well. I am sure that if I could explain in person with hand gestures he would have got it.
I've been using LOTS of those four pin power connectors lately, since they're free at the junkyard.
It seems that the exact same connector used to be almost standard on TURNTABLES all the way back to the war, and maybe before. They're almost all like that in the old console units. There was separate power for the motor and the preamp, and separate grounds.
I guess when they made the first disk drives, they were looking at turntables, which is reasonable. And so the connector lives on... And on and on...
=Rich
P.S. If you ever see one of those console units, you know, the piece of furniture with a stereo in it? GRAB IT! They're old and ugly but they sound great and they make a fantastic stereo computer speaker!
Amazing. I had been told by many people that this was a British Naval Connector. I was once asked this as a trivia question, answered 'British Naval Connector' and was told I was correct!
/var and /usr. No one seems to agree. It's very new technology but the truth may already have been lost.
Goes to show you how incorrect info can become official if no one checks. Kind of like the origins of the names of files and directories in Unix, like
=rmortyh
So, here is what I know. Not everyone here knows their cables or connectors nor do they need to. Here are some simple things to help you out with.
RJ stands for Regents Jack. RJ11 is your typical 2-6 pair telephone jack. RJ45 is your typical 4-5 pair Ethernet pin jack, also gets used for DS1s.
BNC is a Barrel Node Connector. BNC gets used on test equipment, older coax cable NICs for thin or thicknet. Also DS3 twinax cable interfaces. That screw in on the back of your TV set? F-type.
Tons of pretty pictures;
http://www.cmsa.wmin.ac.uk/~alan/compo
Molex appears to have a nice connector tutorial for you to check out. I need to look this over myself;
http://www.molex.com/training/bce/gstoc.
Get yourself a Molex catalog. Every type of cable connector you can imagine. Go to their products page and browse around.
http://www.molex.com
Do not forget Amp, even though their web presence sucks (or last time I looked)
http://www.ampnetconnect.com/
Random cable interfaces, with some pictures;
http://www.peakaudio.com/CobraNet/Netw
Cable Types for 3Com Products
http://support.3com.com/infodeli/tools/
Unix Serial Port Resources: Sun Serial Port & Cables Pinouts
http://www.stokely.com/unix.serial.port.
IEC has standards, like that power plug on the back of your computer -- an IEC 320 plug.
http://www.iec.org/
Your typical U.S. three prong power plug is an NEMA-5-15P (P for plug), and the receptical is a NEMA-5-15R. Here are some charts with pretty pictures;
http://www.leviton.com/sections/techsu
http://www.quail.com/locator/nema.htm
SCSI connectors, pinouts, and protocols, and some IDE/ATA stuff too;
http://t10.org/
Do not forget about the Fiber Channel and HIPPI;
http://www.t11.org
PCI card interfaces;
http://www.pcisig.com/
EIA/TIA;
http://www.tiaonline.org/
Whoa, I just found this... standards for wiretapping?;
http://www.tiaonline.org/standards
Cisco, always a great place to look and learn. Common LAN interfaces from what I see;
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/pro
More Cisco, including V.35 and X.21 pictures;
http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/do
Arg, I had to repost this because Slashdot says, "Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 26.9)." That sucked and needs to change.
If you have more references, please let the world know. I know stuff, you know stuff. Put your stuff here.
I miss the good old days of DB9 connectors on consoles. I can still today take a Sega Genesis control pad and plug it into an Atari 2600 to play games. Works wonders compared to the old joysticks. This was also the time when many consoles could connect to a TV adapter using one standard wire. (Plugged into the side of the adapter, which screwed into the back of the TV)
Why can't we standardize on one connector for many things? Imagine a connector that has identical ends that plug into identical ports on machines (they fit when you turn them around) that can transfer data two-ways and more power than a firewire connector. Is that so much to ask for?
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
I'm guessing from this last Ask Slashdot that the section exists solely for the Chinese and other censored citizens who can no longer access google.com ... I propose that we replace the Ask Slashdot submission form with a cgi interface to google, it could act like a proxy. This would solve the problem quite neatly.
A computer without Microsoft is like ice cream without ketchup.
Sounds like the school is taking advantage of pre-existing TwinAx wiring. TwinAx was very common for attaching IBM 3270/5250/etc dumb-terms to IBM AS/400, System 36, and other very expensive somewhat older IBM systems.
A common implementation of the "BALenced UNbalenced" connector would be as such;
AS/400 has a TwinAx concentator connected to it, this would facilitate 8 TwinAx devices using the hard to work with TwinAx cable with is about 2cm thick and can't be bent more than 90-deg./20cm. Clue-enabled Network/Sys. Admins decide not to suffer under the oppression that is TwinAx and slap some BALUNs on the concentrator and then run CAT5 (or even CAT3) through the ceiling to the host. On the host end, another BALUN adapts the CAT5 back to TwinAx and connects the Dumb Term or, more likely, the ancient IBM highspeed line printer that was printing greenbar 3 AS/400's ago.
As for your school's implementation it could be as simeple as re-using existing wiring, or could be a very well-thought-out way to overcome serious electrical interference (TwinAx only excels at two things these days, interference resistance, and flogging users.)
As far as connectors go, TwinAx was round (bad) but screwed-down once you got it's two leads in place (good).
This reminds me of the time I wrote up a datasheet for the wireless LAN controller chip I was working on, pre-802.11. We designed it to be ethernet compatible, so the chip had a promiscuous mode. I wrote it up just that way. Some some butthead in marketing thought this was offensive and takes it to the division general manager. Now my boss gets a phone call about one of his engineers putting crude language in the technical literature that is destined for customers.
After providing them with copies of our competitors datasheets to prove that this was a standard industry term, they backed down.
Several years later they were acquired for pennies on the dollar.
-tpg
The one to talk about bending, as well as expensive, is the exyernal 50 pin SCSI male connectors.
Way back when in the nooks and crannies of memory, a quarter century ago... I was having cable gender problems. I'd pre-wire something and have the device show up only to find out I'd used the wrong connector and need a gender-bender or to cut off the cable end and have to re-pin it.
And some old guy explained that, given two devices always try to put the *female* end on the expensive part of the equipment, *male* on the cheap side (or the cable). In the event that the pins broke, the expensive piece of equipment wasn't the one crippled.
(Unless, horror of horrors, the pin broke off *in* the female connector...)
Get off my lawn.
No discussion of connectors should pass without mention of the Lemo cylindrical connectors: http://www.lemo.ch
To plug two of these Swiss engineered precision marvels together is nearly as satisfying as sex itself.
Symbolics used these for monitor connections on Lisp Machines. I understand that they are used in places on the Space Shuttle.
Bar none, is the automobile spark plug connector. I hate them. Never can tell whether the things are making contact or just hanging by the rubber.
I suppose the best connectors must be those used in the Aerospace Industry. Big things that cost hundreds of dollars. Gold platted and multi-contact and multi-protected from the atmosphere. The teflon-insulated wires are nice too.
Cut both cables with scissors.
Strip the wires about an inch (with your teeth of course).
Twist the right ones together.
Electrical tape and solder optional.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
Incidentally, you're actually supposed to solder a PL-259 plug to RG-8U coax using a propane torch.
FTN
I believe Juanita
If you insist on this, prove it.
The skin effect is irrelevant at such low frequencies. As a matter of fact, your argument is used by audio equipment salesmen for tricking people into buying new cables and connectors and whatnot.
There is NO WAY a sinusoidal waveform at a few kHz will have a significant impact in signal power. There are plenty of usenet posts on this subject as well if you'd like to confirm my claims.
Anyway, stop trolling.
One of the great things about fire wire is that it's angled on one site, and flat on the other. since this design is part of the plug shape... even cheap cables can be connected by touch. Plus it's hot swapable and all that good stuff... so if USB gets a 9, should Fire Wire get a 9.5... 10? oh, yeah Fire Wire is fast too
I'd like to know your opinion about TOSLINK.
But I should say that given the high voltages (high for the human body, that is), the plugs must be quite large to guarantee a certain level of mechanical sturdiness. I don't want to have a RJ45-sized 100v plug for fear it may someday break when I plug it in.
Heh. Your telephone already does this:
Off-hook voltage: About 5V DC.
On-hook voltage: About 48V DC.
Ring voltage: About 105V 20Hz AC, pulsed in the familiar cycle.
Okay, so, there's no current behind it.
The reason the voltages are so high is to allow for the voltage drop otherwise caused by the line resistance, if they used lower voltages with higher currents.
And, absolutely, I agree with you. But you couldn't draw 1.8kW (120V @ 15A AC line) through an RJ45 anyway. Try it sometime for amusement.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
If you multiply the frequency by k, you multiply the derivative by k as well (we're dealing with sinusoidal signals here). Therefore, the voltage induced also ends up being multiplied by k.
For sinusoidal signals you have that: E = 4.44fNF, where:
E: voltage
f: frequency
N: number of turns in your winding
F: magnetic flux (the right symbol would be a phi)
So consider the transformer's primary winding. Suppose you connect it to a 127 V outlet, so E = 127 V (RMS). N is a fixed value, so let's ignore it in our analysis. We have that the larger the frequency, the smaller our flux will have to be. The flux is proportional to the current through the winding, so there you have it.
Disregarding losses, a transformer operating at 400 Hz will only draw 15% of the current of one operating at 60 Hz in order to magnetize its core. Therefore, if you design a transformer for 400 Hz you'll use a thinner wire gauge (among other things). But this will limit its use at 60 Hz as you've witnessed.
Regardless, this doesn't have much to do with my previous point. 400 Hz transformers are much less efficient if you use a ferromagnetic core. You can go around hysteresis losses by using ferrite cores, but your transformer will be larger. And ferrite cores can only be used for small transformers, so there's no way you'd be using them for power transmission. Your claim of higher frequencies being "better for devices" doesn't make sense. What does that even mean? As far as domestic devices are concerned, most of them are DC anyway so we'd end up rectifying the signal, thus rendering frequency irrelevant.
Making XLR to 1/4" adapters. . .
Making RCA to 1/8" adapters. . .
Cursing the need to replace the RCA connectors on half the equipment once a year. . .
Building patch bays from scratch due to cheap ass management. . .
I loved that job. Not the working part. Just making the patch cables. Beautiful, lovely patch cables. Perfect solder, shiny beautiful solder. . .
you know. . .now that I think about it. . maybe it was the lead fumes. . .
Find out about my new childrens book: SS Death Camp Criminal Batallion Go To Monte Carlo For The Massacre
I think there should be a special place in Hell reserved for the inventor of the cursed hard drive power plug. I can't count how many times I've ended up with a bloody hand after straining to pull the damn plug free only to have it suddently break free sending my hand into some sharp part of my computer innards :-(
I think the now-standard is a three-layer Teflon-Kapton-Teflon insulation, neither Teflon nor Kapton alone a safe enough. Mind that the insulation on these wires is ridiculously thin compared to that on office computer or mains wiring.
Ok, compare the thickness of your USB mouse cable with the thickness of the cables on your headphones. Notice that the headphone cables are much much skinnier. Ok, notice the thickness of an SPDIF optical cable. Also skinny.
There is no reason that 400Mb/s can't easily transfer over much skinnier cables and through a smaller jack. But NOOO, we stupid americans want everything all big and shit. Well fuck that and fuck all of you too. I have mental problems.
HELP I HAVE A.D.D.!!!
Feliz navidad! Feliz navidad!
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, IllegalPlease try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, IllegalPlease try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, IllegalPlease try to keep posts on topic.
Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads.
Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said.
Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal
These have always been the alternate names for these, and far more suitable for those who haven't figured out why some stick out and some don't.
I tend to see these used more often in the context of "phone" plugs (the 1/4" big-assed headphone variety and the 1/8" "mini-phone" variety we're all more accustomed to now, found at the end of our "buds").
-Scott Hutton
No, the problem is over the years there have been a number of standards for external SCSI connectors. So far 3 have stuck:
50 pin Amphenol (aka centronics)
50 pin Micro sub-D
68 pin Micro sub-D
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
My PC as vertical USB jacks. Now you try to insert the USB plug with "USB" up...
I should like to nominate SCART connectors as the crappiest ever. Generally made out of cheap thin metal plates, completely easy to bend & distort. Generally overloaded with a relatively heavy cable loom which the connection friction is incapable bearing. French. Ugly. Stupid. Did I say French?
Most MilSpec connectors are really cool - rugged, easy to use, impossible to break, and always work.
But if I ever find the guy that designed the connectors for the PRC25/77 set man-pack radio handset, I'm going to give him a swift kick in the nuts.
Anybody else want to join in?
There are lots of people who have a solar and/or wind power setup, usually in summer homes that are used in the summer only.
These systems are usually 12V or 24V, and people use all kinds of electric devices. 10W tube lights, small 40W tv's, even 180W coffee machines (takes ages I would say). Of course they use heavy wire and lots of fuses, but it's a perfectly workable system.
My point is, although it might seem difficult or dangerous in theory, it works fine in practice.
The RJ45 connector is fantastic, don't slag it off just because nobody ever bothers to put the rubber boot on it that prevents it getting broken when you pull it backwards through a tangle of wires.
Sadly, most cables you buy off the shelf don't bother with the boots. Sure they add about 3 pennies cost to each connector, but c'mon!
This is the reason that I don't buy network cables from shops any more, besides the fact that they're generally a rip-off. I make them myself, and considering the cost of a crimping tool, you should too (you only need to make 3 cables before you've saved money).
You fool! You've given cheese to a lactose intolerant volcano god! Do you know what that means?
It was very effective. I just hate the smiles I get
at the hardware store when I ask for them.
Regarding making your own cables, it is very much a money saver. If everywhere else is anywhere like Australia, a 5m CAT5 UTP straight through ethernet cable (RJ-45) is about AU$20 - AU$25 (about US$10-12), whilst to make it costs :
$0.45 per metre of CAT5 cable
$0.45 per RJ-45 connector
So realistically, it costs less than $5 (US$ 2.50!!!) for a 5m length... Thats alot of profit going to the retailer. Granted, you have the crimper cost, etc... But once you have it, its a friend for life. Also, you can then have the cable any length you want!! WOW!!!
Back to the thread, the square Fibre connectors (no idea what they are called...) are nice to use, easy to plug in and appear to be quite sturdy, however making the cables looks to be a bitch of a job. We got hold of a CD one day with movies detailing putting the connectors onto the ends of the fibre... It took about 10-15 minutes per end, and there was the danger of the cut off piece of glass entering the skin!!! (However, they were demonstrating, so I presume a competent installer could do it quite quickly). What is more, they are quite streamlined, so pulling them through bundles wouldnt break the connector like with RJ-45's. Mind you, I wouldn't like to be treating the fibre too rough... At the price it is per metre, you wouldn't want to have to make another one!!!
[root@GRIFFIN root]# rpm -e coffee-1.22.3-1a.i386.rpm
error: removing these packages would break dependencies:
It had something to do with Adam and Eve.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
And then there are APC-7 connectors which swing both ways, aka "hermaphroditic" connectors (seriously!). Unfortunately the the stuffy US Navy site below chooses to neuter the "bi" APC-7 by calling it "sexless". Perhaps a case of the US Military policy of "don't ask, don't tell"? :-)
https://ewhdbks.mugu.navy.mil/coax_con.htm
This seemed to be fairly common practice 25 years ago when I was around people who played in small bands. As it was explained to me, AC power cords could handle reasonable amounts of power at relatively low frequencies and were cheap and readily available. There's apparently a lot to be said for being able to replace a broken 1000W speaker cable with a quick trip to the local home supply store.
Bad Boys Rape Our Young Girls But Violet Gives Willingly
Black(0) Brown(1) Red(2) Orange(3) Yellow(4) Green(5) Blue(6) Violet(7) Gray(8) White(9)
I can't belive this hasn't been mentioned yet - I work in the telecommunications field, and fibre optic connectors are great (working like bnc connectors) but why has this good connector not passed over to the consumer optical market? the "toslink" optical plug in for my home theatre receiver is absolute junk!!! I think someone decided they would try to make the most useless connector possible - it is too small, doesn't positively lock in, has a small useless cover that always get's lost and is really hard to use with good quality cable - thick flexible cable is often heavy and defeats the friction lock of the toslink connection - please, get rid of this crap!!
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
(Note: I will be checking your other posts to insult any further stupidity you have displayed on Slashdot, assclown.)
As an EE student, I know how a switching power supply works, thanks. And actually, they first rectify and then make a pulsed signal at x kHz (where x is NOT a constant value), transform and rectify again, so this is not what I'm saying.
I meant that we'd have to transmit at 60 Hz, somehow transform to 20 kHz to use inside our households and then supply our appliances at this frequency. The appliances themselves would decide on what to do, and this would in general involve yet another transformation step. So we'd have 2 transformation steps instead of 1, which is down right idiotic.
The idea is that even thought switching power supplies use high frequency transformers, (1) the frequency changes drastically depending on the load, so providing a fixed 20 kHz feed is absolutely *useless*; (2) even if the frequency didn't change, different supplies need different frequencies; (3) not every device/machine needs a switching power supply (the higher consuming ones DON'T), so we'd be wasting a lot of energy in this transformation step.
God, it's amazing how much bullshit Slashdot can generate from such any subject. You guys should either go to school (and pay attention) or stop making uninformed "corrections".
It is British Naval Connector. Thus we were taught in College. Thus all the network techs call it.
Unless there are a lot of people laughing at me right now...
Junkyard? Good place for them. Too loose, too tight, or just plain unreliable.
Hands-up if you have had to break out the vice-grips to get a secure enough grip to wrench one of these things from its socket.
I am not an electronics technician. But I have built a dozen or so computers over the years, and upgraded or fixed a couple of dozen more. So my experience is relatively limited. Within that limited experience I have found those stupid connectors to be, by far, the most unreliable element in PC style computers.
Cheap metal hooks are crimped on to the wires before they go into the connector. Friction is supposed to be sufficient for the hooks to hold the wires in place. But it is not sufficient.
Here is a horror story.
I had a buddy, who asked me to give him a lift to the computer store, to pick up his brand new computer. I was a bit jealous, as he bought himself a BIG tower case. It had many external bays. It was mounted on casters. It had hinged side panels to give access to the motherboard. I was a bit jealous, and I was sorry I couldn't afford one like that.
I remained jealous for about two months. But then he asked me to give him another lift back to said store, to have his hard drive replaced. He could have carried it on his lap, on the streetcar, if he hadn't bought a the big case.
Well, the owner of the little mom-and-pop shop replaced it, or assured him it was working, three or four times over the next months.
A couple of days after dropping the computer off, I pay a visit to this shop to buy something for myself, and the owner starts to bad-mouth my buddy. His supplier charged him a restocking fee everytime he returned a drive that wasn't actually broken. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Well, it turned out that the first thing he did every time we brought the goldarn thing in, was take the drive out, and put it in his test system.
So, I visited my buddy, and I tested his power connectors. Sure enough, the one that kept being used to connect the hard drive was unreliable. Something had happened to the hooks meant to hold one of the wires in place. You would plug the connector in, and only three of the wires made a firm electrical connection. Any hard drive connected to that connector developed bad sectors. Presumably it was supplying intermittent power. Maybe it was arcing.
The owner/technician at the mom-and-pop computer shop never found this simple problem because he never tested the drives in situ.
But I wasn't smart enough to learn from his mistake. I built a computer, as a favour, for someone I didn't really know, to pay off a family obligation. I used some stuff I bought used, but which I had tested. Then I got calls that it wasn't working. I thought I test that hard drive! Where did these bad sectors come from? So I replaced it with my own hard drive, bought new, which I knew to be reliable. It developed bad sectors too. Sure enough, it too had a white power connector with a wire with crimp on hooks that didn't work.
Now it is the first thing I suspect if someone tells me their hard drive is developing bad sectors.
And even when they do provide a good electrical connection, what about the times the mechanical connection they provide is order of magnitude or two too secure?
I wish all our peripherals used the smaller power connector used on 3.5 inch floppies.
Sure, zip cord makes fine speaker cable. But put a standard phono plug on the end, not a wall plug.
(Of course, then you've got the problem of telling speaker cables from instrument cables - both have 1/4 inch phono plugs (more formally, "tip-sleeve" plugs, I think), but instrument cable is coxial, speaker cable is two parallel conductors.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
tip-ring-sleeve, if you're dealing with two-lead (stereo) connectors anyway. granted, for speakers and instruments, you prolly don't need the middle, "ring" part, but the mono version is a latter-day derivative.
this one was invented back in the days of manual telephone switchboards; three leads were needed because the telephone cable used a pair of connectors plus a grounding sheath, much as phone lines still do, unless they're fiberoptic trunklines. switchboard operators would plug the connector into the appropriate slot after getting the "dialer" to tell them who they wanted to talk to.
to this day, one of the wires in a telephone twisted pair is technically known as the "tip" wire and the other one is "ring", but i keep forgetting which is which. (yes, there is a way to tell, but no, it doesn't really matter.)
The boots (to prevent tangling) are easy to come by, but they cost $0.082/pair and that would cut into the cable manufacturer's profits.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
How many electrical engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
No, I don't have an answer to that, but Ira Flatow's book They All Laughed has an interesting history on the rivalry between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison.
Among the information is the tidbit that Westinghouse and Edison had different types of connectors for their light bulbs. Edison being the crafty type gave away adapters so you could insert an Edison bulb into a Westinghouse socket. The genius of it was that the adapter could not be removed once inserted, thereby requiring you to buy Edison's bulbs. That's why we screw in our light bulbs (Not that kind of screw, you perv!) and the connector is called an "Edison" base.
Apologies if this is only slightly correct; I don't have the book in front of me at this moment.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
...what Compaq is smoking. I've ranted about their connectors (and screws!) before, but this one took that little throbbing vein in my forehead to new heights. I recently had to replace a failed power supply in a Compaq Deskpro system. The power supply connection on the motherboard is specially keyed so it will not accept a standard supply! The Compaq supply is keyed to match, but the connection is electically identical to the real thing. The machine is back in service, but it took a bit of filing off little plastic nubs to get it that way.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
nope. I just fail to see any specialness in being the first person to make a post in a forum, or understand why anyone else would possibly think it was such a great accomplishment. You're not the first person to discover a cure for cancer. You're not the first person to make fire. You're not doing anything even remotely special, yet they get so damn excited about it, as if they'd done something completely outrageous. *shrug* Freaks.
In the early days of touch-tone pads, it made a difference. If you reversed the tip and ring, the touch-tone pad didn't work because it was powered off the DC voltage on the line and the polarity was wrong. This design error was eventually corrected by putting a rectifier in front of the touch-tone pad.
Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but putting 1000W of power through a 1/4 inch phono plug for sustained periods of time would make me nervous. The AC connectors were designed with lots of power and >100V in mind-- they have big screw connectors that are well seperated, etc.
Actually, for real power there are other types of connectors used, like the Speakon. For my little 100W PA, though, or any small room set-up, I think the 1/4 inch phono plug is fine. (Except that it's the same connector used for unbalanced instrument cables, which would not be the case in a perfect world.)
'Course, I wouldn't put 1000W through zip cord (aka lamp cord) either.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Actually, he's right. You are new around here.