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Mac Pro - Front Panel woes... And solution!
I had so much good luck with information posted on the Aquamac site that I didn't think I'd have any problems with the front panel pinouts...
However, after wiring to the Aquamac diagram, I found that neither of my USB ports worked... After much tinkering, it looks like the +5 volt supply for the two USB ports was all that was missing. So, here is my revised version of the Front Panel wiring diagram.
Note that the 2 "lower front" pins power the individual USB ports. The "frontmost" pin powers the upper USB port and the pin next to it powers the lower USB port. I just twisted all 3 of the +5 volt lines together and spliced them into a single +5 volt line from the SATA power connector.
The "green" line/wire provides power for the front panel white LED (power on).
The "purple" line/wire provides the Power button signal for the motherboard. Neither the LED or Power button require a ground line as long as the "black" line/wire is connected properly to the system ground.
What is missing from this diagram is the "SATA" cable that is used to carry the USB signals to the motherboard. Many of the other threads out there about hacking the front panel talk about use of SATA/eSATA to encapsulate USB... Well, that's just garbage. Not sure why Apple chose to use this "standard" connector in a non-standard approach, but it probably came down to cost. These connectors are used so widely that they are probably very cheap. While it happens to have a SATA connector on it, it is simply used as a piece of shielded 2 pair cable (happens to NOT be twisted pair). I used a "left" angle black SATA cable (bought at NewEgg).
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812123282
This cable has the angled connector in the opposite direction from the "standard" right-angle SATA connector (I guess that's why people call it a Left-angle connector??). It is the proper orientation for the cable header and points towards the motherboard.
Cut off the "straight" end of the cable and either splice on an existing USB header connector or buy a new USB header connector and attach to the end of the USB cable (that's what I did).
I did use Aquamac's wiring diagram for this cable:
Works great!
I have no Firewire ports on my motherboard and don't really see a need for them, so I won't be connecting those any time soon.
When I figure out the audio header, I'll post that too...
EDITED: 2012-07-04 - MobileMe is down forever... Had to re-point my images...
Hello!
I am working on getting the front panel of an old Mac Pro tower to work with my little NUC Hackintosh. I have the pinout of my front panel board, I have already followed your above guide for connecting the left handed SATA to the usb 2.0 header but wanted to know what the 12v power was for and if it was possible to make a pinout to just go from the front panel to my front panel header on the NUC board.
Here is the pinout on my NUC board:
Any help would be much appreciated!
Learjet7