Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Stupid Connector Pinout Problem

Today I spent half of a working day correcting the problem with wrong IDC2-10 connector pinout. The usual pattern in which pins are ordered is as follows:
1 3 5 7 9
2 4 6 8 10
In the User's Manual of industrial PC, to which I must connect, the picture looks like:
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10
I was slightly alarmed when I saw it the first time, but I thought that this is their right to re-order pins on their own module. Today, when I tried to get my PCB and this third-party industrial PC to work together, it was revealed that pins on its socket are actually ordered in a usual way, as shown in the first block. The unusual order that I observed in the manual was result of mere inaccuracy of their documentation writer. Strictly speaking, this is not my fault, but if I would check the actual ordering of pins before working on PCB, it would save me several hours of my life. Instead, today I have had to do some mounted-wire soldering on all manufactured devices to bring PCB footprints pinout to an actual state.

UPD: They fixed this error in the latest version of the manual. I should had to check for the latest version before using it.

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