Soldering and wiring

Only modules bought assembled arrive with their cables soldered. A module ordered unassembled you solder yourself, just like anything you sourced on your own.

Red and black

An input reads as pressed when its signal wire touches ground. Red is the signal and goes to the part of the switch you want to read; black is ground, on every connector, always. Ground sits on pin 2 of every JST connector, so with cables of your own, check which wire lands on pin 2, or look it up in the PCB design files.

All grounds are one net: every black wire and every ground pin on the board is connected to every other. So it never matters which ground a switch uses, switches on the same module can share one ground wire, and touching any black wire against a signal terminal presses that button. It also means that when you only need the red wire from a connector, you can safely cut the black one off at the base.

Finding the right terminals

Toggle switches

A toggle switch usually has three terminals, even with only two positions. The middle is the common, and black always goes there. Red goes on the outer terminals you want to read: either outer for a simple on/off (one input pin), both outers for a 3-way (two pins). If an on/off reads backwards, swap the red to the other side or invert it later in the software. On a 3-way, the middle position leaves both signals open, and the firmware turns that into its own button during module setup.

Buttons and micro switches

These label their terminals instead: C is the common, NO connects only while pressed, NC the opposite. Black on C, red on NO, one input pin each. A control that sits stuck on and releases when you press it is wired to NC. The lever's two micro switches wire this way too, together acting as one 3-way.

Rotary switches

A rotary switch has a central pin surrounded by outer pins, one per position. The central pin is the common: connect it to a single ground pin. Each position you want to read gets its own signal wire on its outer pin, except the last one; the firmware reads that position from all the others being open, so a rotary takes one pin per position minus one.

On a rotary switch with more physical positions than you are using, wire the terminals for the first positions of the sweep. Find them with a multimeter, or wire only the common, plug the board in with the desktop app open, and touch the common against each terminal in turn: the button that lights up tells you which terminal is which.

Rotary encoders

A rotary encoder has pins on two sides. The side with two pins is its push button: those go to a black and a red pin, in no particular order. The side with three pins is the encoder itself: the middle pin goes to black and the two outer pins to red. Encoders are only supported on the direct GPIO pins, D1 to D22, so make sure theirs end up there; that is still plenty of them, and the box supports up to 10 encoders. If you have a rev1 board, contact me for some direct help instead.

Soldering

The cables you order from me can be soldered on as they are; there is no need to clip them first.

1. Solder a JST cable to each control, black to the common, red to the terminal you want to read.

   On the key module, work through the three keys in the order you seated them. That is why keeping them in the same orientation earlier matters.

2. Cover the soldered section in hot glue. Optional, but recommended: it takes the strain off the joints and makes them last a lot longer.
3. Plug the connectors into the board and route the cables so they clear the plate. Remember that encoders go on D1 to D22.