- Joined
- Nov 11, 2020
- Messages
- 28
- Motherboard
- Asus H410M-E
- CPU
- I9-10900
- Graphics
- GTX 1080 Ti
Meanwhile at the mancave, I've been looking at the 44 pin multiconnector cable on my Mac Pro A1289 front panel, to the original logicboard. Both ends are 44 pin 2,0mm spacing mini jst connectors and while I have a set of 2,5mm pins and connectors, it's not usable for this smaller more narrow pin type. So, I decided to undo one end connector, and it looks like this. Note: the cable can only be connected one way to sit correctly, as wires are twisted and meant to be at a certain position. Connetor is the same though.
This is done with a magnifying glass plus a good lamp (old eyes), and a thick sewing needle, which I then carefully lifted up one tap at a time, very little, just enough so that I can slowly pull out the individual wire and it's connector.
By using the list/diagram from above, which is another users findings, not mine, I then decided to remove all wires that is not used according to this scheme.
In doing so, I assumed that the pin 23-44 designated, are the outermost row, towards the spectator/the service door (side of Mac Pro cabinet) removed, and the numbers 1-22 are the lowermost row in a similar orientation, if that makes sense.
Working with this, I suppose that the dots marked red in the schematics above, are "GND" - ground.
These are the surplus wires after doing so. I'll keep them for future updates, if I manage to find out more usable connections:
This was the cable I ended up with so far. The white dot is something I have applied, as it helps to orientate the cable, when working on all the individual wires:
As can be seen on this picture, there is a mixture of thin and a little bit thicker wires. These are by Apple installed where either more amps are drawn or for example a group of wires need to be wound up together to keep signal integrity. I suppose. That is at least normal practise. This seems to be valid for some of the USB cables as well. I'll get back to that later.
So, the groups of wires taken off here, are not all needed to be removed, according to the schematics above. Because of that, some need to be re-installed. I chose other separate wires as a first try, and if need be, I'll undo those and install thicker gauge wires/insulated wires again, for example the USB as mentioned.
Then it was time to follow the pins designated in the schematics above, and I started by clipping off only the small 2,0mm spaced jst female pin, one at a time, and solder on a long wire to reach the motherboard by using the usual path with hidden cables as per Mac Pro's design. That is 4 wires, a total of 1 more than in the schematics above, as I wanted to keep a ground (gnd) for both the "Power on LED" and one ground for the "Power on button". This is because if I don't reach a point where I will have most or all of it working, at least I will secure propper ground for both "Power button" and "Power LED" independently.
After that procedure, I ended up with a multiconnector like this, and then carefully tested it after each wire soldered into the system:
Note the red heat shrink wrap. It's for identification purposes and will be hidden away later. I had to be very careful using a heatgun on the heat shrink wrap, as these are very thin wires and they simply melt down if too much heat is applied. So heat gun only for short time and only on low heat setting.
I then went on to divide the remaining wires into groups such as power, audio and usb, on the multi pin connector:
1/: White wrap - for power on and power led. 4 pins in total.
2/: Blue wrap - for sound jack connector on front panel, as in for example a headphone. 3 pins in total.
Note: 6 wires in Apple's setup, so I suppose at least one of those are a sensing wire. The 3 wires I did not use, and therefore removed so far, are pin 39 and 38 on outer row, and pin 5 on the lower row. One or more of these can be re-installed into the connector, if or when I'll find out what they are used for, such as sensing the jack inserted into the front panel jack.
Pins in that group all isolated from the other wires, I suppose are all somehow for audio. I could be wrong though. In that group of separetely isolated wires, they are coloured as follows:
Outer row: ----------------------------------------- Inner row:
pin 40 common: black (now used) --------------- pin 5 (unknown): green
pin 39 (unknown): black -------------------------- pin 6 Right channel: grey (now used)
pin 38 (unknown): purple ------------------------- pin 7 Left channel: brown (now used)
3/: Upper red wrap - for upper row of pins of the USB 2,0 connector (on the schematics).
4/: Lower red wrap - for lower row of pins of the USB 2,0 connector (on the schematics).
So, the prefinished front panel cable, was ready to be installed temporarily into the Mac Pro and test for power on/off and power on led. It did work as it should, so I can go on trying to compare the wires/pins for the audio, to the pins on my motherboard, which is an Asus H410M-E. That motherboard is a year 2020 design, so use a 7,1 audio setup. Terrible. I don't like that and would prefer the usual old school AC97. But one cannot always hang on to old stuff.
So, having totally different names, I would really appreciate, if someone knowledgable out there could tell me which led the Mac Pro wires correspond to in relation the the 7,1 HD audio on the Asus motherboard?
Here's the audio pins from my Asus H410M-E motherboard. I tried to scetch down the pin connector on the Asus motherboard. I hope it makes sense.
Question:
On this, one can see a "sense_send" pin. Would that be for the front jack for example? And what pin on the A1289
Mac Pro front panel board connector would that be?
I really hope someone can help out with this.
I'll get back to the USB2 pins later.
Here's the cable as it is now. Once I have found out what to connect to what and tested it thoroughly, I'll smarten it up to ressemble the cables that Apple uses in the Mac Pro. When all is set and done, hopefully, I'll redo some of the small 2-pin connectors, to be a 4-pin connector, to ease installation, orientation and clearness.
As for wireing the front panel on this A1289 Mac Pro from 2010, I am not sure they are all the same as say early 2009 Mac Pro, as front panel connectors changed many times over a production period/model spec changes. I have another spare complete 2010 front panel cable, which I'll keep as a reference. This could prove helpfull to see if some of the wires for USB and Firewire 800 have changed compared to the schematics above which may be an 2009 machine. I'll write back on that if I find out more.
As I've read numerous places that the Mac Pro power button is not very long lasting, I thought it was a good idea to install a new one anyway. The failure of me trying to solder on cables and it didn't work on the old power button, was not completely wasted after all
Finally, I've also worked on Win10 tonight, uninstalling not only all sorts of crap that it contains, but also by formatting the new small 240Gb ssd to be a Windows swap drive only. As I have 32Gb RAM for the time being, I set the limit for the swap file to be minimum 32Gb and maximum 32Gb. So totally held in ties. As it learns how I work on this new pc, it'll smarten up and react faster and faster up to the point where I won't introduce new ways of working on the pc. That point probably never happens Anyway, just some info on that as well.
More later.
Kind regards,
Laverda
This is done with a magnifying glass plus a good lamp (old eyes), and a thick sewing needle, which I then carefully lifted up one tap at a time, very little, just enough so that I can slowly pull out the individual wire and it's connector.
By using the list/diagram from above, which is another users findings, not mine, I then decided to remove all wires that is not used according to this scheme.
In doing so, I assumed that the pin 23-44 designated, are the outermost row, towards the spectator/the service door (side of Mac Pro cabinet) removed, and the numbers 1-22 are the lowermost row in a similar orientation, if that makes sense.
Working with this, I suppose that the dots marked red in the schematics above, are "GND" - ground.
These are the surplus wires after doing so. I'll keep them for future updates, if I manage to find out more usable connections:
This was the cable I ended up with so far. The white dot is something I have applied, as it helps to orientate the cable, when working on all the individual wires:
As can be seen on this picture, there is a mixture of thin and a little bit thicker wires. These are by Apple installed where either more amps are drawn or for example a group of wires need to be wound up together to keep signal integrity. I suppose. That is at least normal practise. This seems to be valid for some of the USB cables as well. I'll get back to that later.
So, the groups of wires taken off here, are not all needed to be removed, according to the schematics above. Because of that, some need to be re-installed. I chose other separate wires as a first try, and if need be, I'll undo those and install thicker gauge wires/insulated wires again, for example the USB as mentioned.
Then it was time to follow the pins designated in the schematics above, and I started by clipping off only the small 2,0mm spaced jst female pin, one at a time, and solder on a long wire to reach the motherboard by using the usual path with hidden cables as per Mac Pro's design. That is 4 wires, a total of 1 more than in the schematics above, as I wanted to keep a ground (gnd) for both the "Power on LED" and one ground for the "Power on button". This is because if I don't reach a point where I will have most or all of it working, at least I will secure propper ground for both "Power button" and "Power LED" independently.
After that procedure, I ended up with a multiconnector like this, and then carefully tested it after each wire soldered into the system:
Note the red heat shrink wrap. It's for identification purposes and will be hidden away later. I had to be very careful using a heatgun on the heat shrink wrap, as these are very thin wires and they simply melt down if too much heat is applied. So heat gun only for short time and only on low heat setting.
I then went on to divide the remaining wires into groups such as power, audio and usb, on the multi pin connector:
1/: White wrap - for power on and power led. 4 pins in total.
2/: Blue wrap - for sound jack connector on front panel, as in for example a headphone. 3 pins in total.
Note: 6 wires in Apple's setup, so I suppose at least one of those are a sensing wire. The 3 wires I did not use, and therefore removed so far, are pin 39 and 38 on outer row, and pin 5 on the lower row. One or more of these can be re-installed into the connector, if or when I'll find out what they are used for, such as sensing the jack inserted into the front panel jack.
Pins in that group all isolated from the other wires, I suppose are all somehow for audio. I could be wrong though. In that group of separetely isolated wires, they are coloured as follows:
Outer row: ----------------------------------------- Inner row:
pin 40 common: black (now used) --------------- pin 5 (unknown): green
pin 39 (unknown): black -------------------------- pin 6 Right channel: grey (now used)
pin 38 (unknown): purple ------------------------- pin 7 Left channel: brown (now used)
3/: Upper red wrap - for upper row of pins of the USB 2,0 connector (on the schematics).
4/: Lower red wrap - for lower row of pins of the USB 2,0 connector (on the schematics).
So, the prefinished front panel cable, was ready to be installed temporarily into the Mac Pro and test for power on/off and power on led. It did work as it should, so I can go on trying to compare the wires/pins for the audio, to the pins on my motherboard, which is an Asus H410M-E. That motherboard is a year 2020 design, so use a 7,1 audio setup. Terrible. I don't like that and would prefer the usual old school AC97. But one cannot always hang on to old stuff.
So, having totally different names, I would really appreciate, if someone knowledgable out there could tell me which led the Mac Pro wires correspond to in relation the the 7,1 HD audio on the Asus motherboard?
Here's the audio pins from my Asus H410M-E motherboard. I tried to scetch down the pin connector on the Asus motherboard. I hope it makes sense.
Question:
On this, one can see a "sense_send" pin. Would that be for the front jack for example? And what pin on the A1289
Mac Pro front panel board connector would that be?
I really hope someone can help out with this.
I'll get back to the USB2 pins later.
Here's the cable as it is now. Once I have found out what to connect to what and tested it thoroughly, I'll smarten it up to ressemble the cables that Apple uses in the Mac Pro. When all is set and done, hopefully, I'll redo some of the small 2-pin connectors, to be a 4-pin connector, to ease installation, orientation and clearness.
As for wireing the front panel on this A1289 Mac Pro from 2010, I am not sure they are all the same as say early 2009 Mac Pro, as front panel connectors changed many times over a production period/model spec changes. I have another spare complete 2010 front panel cable, which I'll keep as a reference. This could prove helpfull to see if some of the wires for USB and Firewire 800 have changed compared to the schematics above which may be an 2009 machine. I'll write back on that if I find out more.
As I've read numerous places that the Mac Pro power button is not very long lasting, I thought it was a good idea to install a new one anyway. The failure of me trying to solder on cables and it didn't work on the old power button, was not completely wasted after all
Finally, I've also worked on Win10 tonight, uninstalling not only all sorts of crap that it contains, but also by formatting the new small 240Gb ssd to be a Windows swap drive only. As I have 32Gb RAM for the time being, I set the limit for the swap file to be minimum 32Gb and maximum 32Gb. So totally held in ties. As it learns how I work on this new pc, it'll smarten up and react faster and faster up to the point where I won't introduce new ways of working on the pc. That point probably never happens Anyway, just some info on that as well.
More later.
Kind regards,
Laverda
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