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SoftPower, HDD LED, and Power LED connectors...

Posted: Thu Dec 02, 2004 5:29 pm
by His Royal Majesty King V
All,

Well, after a while of not touching it, I finally decided to play with that old Compaq Athlon system again. I figure if I can figure out the wiring of the button panel, maybe I can put in a true standard board, and just make my own connectors to plug the button/led board to the header pins for the power led, hdd led, and power switch.

There's 6 wires, and just the three items, so I'm figuring this should be easy.

Right off I figure pins 5 and 6 are for the power.

It seems that pins 2 and 3 are for the HDD LED, because disconnecting either one of them seems to render that LED nonfunctional.

However, for the Power LED, it seems only pin 1 does anything! Is it me, or does that seem strange? I figured removing the wire for Pin 4 should disable something, but it doesn't!

Does this seem normal? I'm trying to figure out how/why this works the way it does.

Posted: Fri Dec 03, 2004 11:19 am
by DasMan2
Some panel headers are weird to say the least.

I have seen some that actually had the printing on the m.b. flipped as to where the plug-ins actually go.

You might have to try to space the next pin for the NEG plug on a common ground to make sure you are actually plugging in the POS wire in to a POS pinout.
Now just find the actual NEG pin out which may be beside the POS or one away ...maybe even two away.

I have seen a panel header that had both wirings of Next to each other and other plugins for say the H.D.D. LED across from each other.
(Not uniform ordering)

Compaq board I have is like that.

Posted: Sun Dec 05, 2004 7:47 pm
by His Royal Majesty King V
Looks like, as suggested to me on the AMDZone boards, that it uses a "common ground" system.

Here's what I've come up with:

Power LED:
1 and chassis
OR
1 and 3
OR
1 and 5


HDD LED:
2 and chassis
OR
2 and 3
OR
2 and 5


Soft Power:
5 and 6


Of course, naively, I thought that I could still use this with a standard motherboard. Tried it on one, and found that if I had the Power LED or HDD LED wires connected, the board would automatically power itself on, then power itself off after a few seconds. I never tried it with the button board attached to the chassis.

Ah well...... total bummer. Looks like I can only use an exact replacement motherboard (or one that works the same way), and not a standard type motherboard.

At least, as far as I can tell. I could be wrong, but I'm too impatient to experiment.

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:29 pm
by Jim
Yeah, I made the mistake of buying a Compac once. - Never again. Darn thing blew its floppy, and had to replace it. Proprietary part. Regular floppy $7.50 - $15.00 depending on new or used. Compac floppy $92.00 plus tax, total about $107.00 Canadian. Like I said, never again. Strictly Clones for this kid from then on.