This weekend I finished up wiring up the control panel lights, namely the occupancy detection LEDs.

I first created my wire hareness for the Digitrax BDL-168 board. I bought some ribbon cable assemblies from DigiKey (Part # M1AXA-1036R-ND) made to fit the pin headers on the board, and some dual port 4-Conductor RJ-11 surface mount boxes.

In order to keep track of the wiring, I label each jack A & B, and the each pair 1 & 2. So I’d have 1A1, 1A2, 1B1, 1B2 for a box. 2A1, 2A2, 2A3… and so one for 4 boxes. I then assigned a track to each pair. It was then just a matter of connecting the LED in the control panel to correct pair and running phone cable between the two.

Here’s a look at the boxes for the BDL-168

The boxes mounted inside the control panel:

And here it is lit up on the wall:

All that’s left is to run wires to the servo machines and the panel will be done.  Just waiting on some rolls of servo cable to arrive.

Shaun General