wifi-desk-controller
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tjhorner
Board v2 Feature: Pinout Switching
In v1 of the board, the pinouts are fixed, which means that desks must provide +5V on pin 5 and GND on pin 3. Some desks do not have these pins in the proper place, which means they are entirely incompatible without some cable-splicing hackery. For v2, I would like to add some way to change the RJ45 pins that these two power lines live on post-manufacturing, so that other formerly-incompatible desks could be used without any physical changes.
Currently I am thinking of implementing this with some DIP switches — one to dictate the +5V line, and the other to dictate the GND line. Progress on this feature will be tracked in this issue.
After looking into this, it seems like it's not a very easy task. I think it would be better to make different versions of the board with common pinouts, because there can only be, what, like three different pinouts? Four? So let's see if we can gather enough data on those and I can make variations of the PCB for that
@tjhorner I can work with you for Loctekmotion desks. It seems there are two possible pinouts here, however it also seems that the desk controller can detect the 'control panel' and adapt the output...
We haven't figured this out fully yet.
Interesting. Does it swap where it outputs +5V and places GND, somehow? They might be using transistors/MOSFETs to do this 🤔
I'd look into jumper pads. Sparkfun uses them all the time to be able to configure their boards with different voltages. You'd just need really good documentation to make sure you don't short 5v to GND
