My project has a front panel that has six pots and four LED buttons on it. When I wired it up, I ran a line from each pin that needed +5v back to a bus (that I cut out of a piece of perfboard) and each pin that needed ground back to a separate bus. There is quite a spaghetti-mess of wires coming off of the front panel of my project! Tonight, it occurred to me that I could have saved myself a lot of wiring by connecting all of the components' ground pins to each other in serial, then connecting all of the components' 5v pins to each other, and then running a single ground and 5v line back to the main board in the project box. Is there any unexpected reason why this might be a bad idea? Electrically, it seems the same as if all the lines were run back to a bus.
I suppose one down-side is that a single bad joint or failed wire breaks all components downstream, instead of breaking a single component, but I'm not sure if I wouldn't be willing to accept that risk, in exchange for simpler wiring.
Either way, at least 16 dedicated lines need to come into the box--one to read each pot, one to read each switch, one to power each LED, and at least one ground and 5v line. But this would still cut the number of lines down from 40, which is where it's at now.
Yes, you can connect all the 5V together, and you can connect all the grounds together. You will then only have one 5V connection and one ground connection to your panel. The circuit will not know the difference.
Your right, you will not have redundancy, so if one wire breaks, they all could fail. And the only other downside I can think of would be less current capacity, and this shouldn't be a problem for what you are doing. Just dealing with less wires to fail may and troubleshooting problems could far outweigh the disadvantages.
Ok, cool. I will keep that in mind. Attached is what the project currently looks like. Pretty ugly. Maybe after I have it working really well and in more of a finished state, I will re-wire everything to make it neater.
Looks like you have a lot of work into this, if it works, go with it! I think you did a nice net job of keeping all the bundles together. But I may be the wrong guy to ask, I kind of like the look of lots of wires
Are you really using solid wire for this? If you have to re-wire it... consider using stranded wire if you plan to move or re-work it. Solid wire has the potential to break very easily. You can greatly reduce your concern about failed "serial" connections by using a wire that can tolerate a little flexing.
I am using solid wire. This is just the prototype, and I am still working out the exact controls, and so forth. I didn't have any hookup wire in the house, so I pulled a few feet off of a spool of Cat-5 cable that I had laying around and un-twisted the pairs. If the project works well, I will do another version, in a better-looking box, with more careful layout of the controls, and yes, proper hookup wire. Hopefully the solid wire will hang in there long enough for me to get to that point.
