So I’ve been working on a new project which requires that I’m able to move the Gameboy’s cartridge connector around freely without regard for where the main board might be. At first I thought I’ll just get some ribbon cable and solder it from the connector to the main board but that just gets extremely messy.
So I decided to sit down and dedicate an hour of my life to the Eagle part designer. After some meticulous measuring with my favorite pair of digital calipers I was able to create a pretty accurate layout of the connector. To test, I used my mini CNC to drill all of the pin holes and drill some pilot holes for the bigger holes which I later finished with the drill press.
Here’s a picture of what that looks like.
Ok so I lied, I didn’t use my drill press.. It was late at night and I got lazy so I just used whatever drill bit I could find to make the holes big enough. I was mainly concerned with everything lining up which it did.
I made a few minor adjustments to the part and then created the Gerber file to ship out to the PCB manufacturer.
Here’s a few pictures of what I got back.
So the idea is to solder pin headers on the other side and then attach a ribbon cable with an IDX connector on one end and solder the ribbon cable to the gameboy’s main board. I actually thought about designing a matching breakout for the main board that can be soldered on the main board and have pin headers soldered on. This would make for the cleanest connection. If anyone is interested in that let me know and I might give it shot.
More info to come on the project that I’m working on.
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