{"id":775,"date":"2012-12-28T14:06:20","date_gmt":"2012-12-28T14:06:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/?p=775"},"modified":"2012-12-28T15:29:17","modified_gmt":"2012-12-28T15:29:17","slug":"diy-usb-adapter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/diy-usb-adapter\/","title":{"rendered":"DIY USB Adapter"},"content":{"rendered":"

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My current MIDI controller has a Mini-USB connector. This has to be one of the worst possible features of the device.\u00a0 I was facing a lot of garbage data and MIDI dropouts recently and it all came down to faulty contacts caused by this connector.<\/p>\n

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Even worse: the connector is attached on the left side of the device, drastically increasing the possibility of ripping it off unintentionally.<\/p>\n

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I already thought about attaching another type of USB connctor when I hacked the controller itself<\/a> but somehow I forgot about it (or was too lazy or …).<\/p>\n

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Anyways… the problems I had were big enough\u00a0 and I wanted to test this kind of hack for quite a long time so it’s finally enough to start thinking about it:<\/p>\n

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If you look very closely you see that there are 5 spring-loaded contacts inside a female Mini-USB connector. Right below every contact is a small hole. I guess that’s where the contact is stuffed into the plastic. My plan was to use these holes with a very thin wire so the wires would touch the contacts ‘from below’. In order to keep the wires from falling out I wanted to apply some pressure to the contacts via a thin piece of plastic.<\/p>\n

I had this one lying around and it turned out to have just the correct thickness. Only needed to cut a bit out of it.<\/p>\n

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Excellent<\/p>\n

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Here it all comes together (you only need 4 of the 5 contacts):<\/p>\n

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The wires are held in place surprisingly well so I built a small breakout-board with a somewhat sturdy USB B-Type connector:<\/p>\n

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Don’t forget to cut the coppertraces so the shield is not shortenend with any of the 4 pins. Of course I forgot that and only realized it after applying the first ton of hotglue …<\/p>\n

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The board is attached to the side of the controller using hotglue, the wires are soldered to the corresponding pins. The wire itself is insulated by a clear coating which gets off as soon as you start soldering. As long as you don’t torture them too much there is no problem with shortcuts caused by touching wires.<\/p>\n

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After i made sure everything is working fine I attached … slightly … more hotglue to make it ready for some rough handling:<\/p>\n

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Looks fine, doesn’t it? I am not facing any faulty data or dropouts anymore, the connector is sturdy as hell and it is now pointing to\/ from the back side of the device making it less prone to accidental pull-outs.\u00a0Furthermore I now have to carry only one kind of USB cable with me whenever I’m out making music.<\/p>\n

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  My current MIDI controller has a Mini-USB connector. This has to be one of the worst possible features of the device.\u00a0 I was facing a lot of garbage data and MIDI dropouts recently and it all came down to faulty contacts caused by this connector.   Even worse: the \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[41,42,40,39],"class_list":["post-775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projekte","tag-adapter","tag-diy","tag-mini","tag-usb","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/andyland.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}