Keyboard inverters/converters for terminals

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 22 May 2020 at 05:26, Rico Pajarola via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> >
> The whole concept of "if the plug fits, it will at least not blow up" is
> kind of a late invention.

Ha!

I have an old external 3.5" IDE disk enclosure. It's a good enclosure,
too -- Firewire 800 _and_ USB 2 _and_ eSATA. It has the internal drive
from my old iMac G5 in it. The iMac suffered from failing capacitors
and I coaxed a little more life from it by making its HD external.

I wish to retrieve its contents.

It has a very odd power connector. It's a DIN plug with quite a few
pins -- 7 or 8 and a plastic locator. Unique PSU.

As I have been on mandatory working-from-home for a couple of months,
I took my Mac mini setup in the bedroom apart and stashed the bits
away, and set up
my work laptop with 2 old external screens as a home office. One
ancient Eizo screen and a slightly more modern HDMI one.

Snag: I failed to pack the modern HDMI screen's PSU brick away with it.

This led to a lot of frantic hunting. I found the power brick, and some others.

The snag is this. I now have _two_ power bricks for the external
drive. Both deliver the requisite *both* 12V and 5V. Both have the
right DIN plug and fit.

But they're wired differently. One's ground pins are the other's 12V pins.

I think this is now resolved but it was an interesting question: one
brick will power the drive, while the other, with an identical
connector, is more or less guaranteed to release the magic smoke from
the external enclosure.

🤔


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