Electronic Guru's please - Extending a power button cable

[DJMK4]

Hi all,

I am posting this in here as it might rack some minds of electronic guru's, plus I dont seem to be getting any response in other forums

What I am doing is mounting a laptop motherboard that I have in to a DVD case, and making a wifi media streamer.

I am planning on using the power button on the front of the DVD player to power the laptop components.

The laptop power pcb is quite small in size, and has a tiny ribbon coming off it which slots in to a little slot on the motherboard, I could in theory mount this small PCB behind the button on the front of the DVD player, however due to the ribbon only being 4cm long, I dont think I am going to have enough length.

is there a way I could mod this, and maybe get some wire and do a solder job to a button on the front of the DVD player?

 

[DJMK4]

I think its about 4-5 very small wires, there is about 4-5 pins on the end, I will try and get you a picture now of the power pcb

 

[DJMK4]

There you go, thats all it is

 

[DJMK4]

No, I have the motherboard and all the internals from the laptop, as the laptop screen and plastics were knackered, however the dual core laptop boots fine.

It's just a small unit to stream films from as my main PC I dont really like on all the time as its noisy.

More of a slow project really, as I like making things out of stuff I have lying around.

More info on identifying the two switch pins would be good, I am not sure how to identify them by "shorting" them

 

[DJMK4]

Ahh k, are you sure it can book without the screen?

Yes as it hooks up to my 24" monitor via the VGA or HDMI cable, I have had the motherboard layed out on my desk and it booted in to windows fine.

Just need to find a solution where I can easily switch it on.

 

[DJMK4]

I have heard of people using two wires from some CAT5e, do you think this should suffice as I have some at home. I can test this tomorrow then when my DVD case arrives

 

[DJMK4]

I have the cat5e cable at home, I can just splice the outer core and strip out two wires, but I am going to need somewhere to solder them on, as the end of the ribbon is the copper pin's, then on the PCB side is a white slot where the ribbon slots in to.

 

[DJMK4]

Rather than trying to figure out which wires to use on the ribbon, just wire a push button to the pcb contacts of the switch itself.

So have wires from the push button on the DVD player joined to the PCB contact that was with the laptop?

 

[DJMK4]

at the back of the power button there will be 2 contacts, solder some old pc fan wire or speaker cable e.t.c to both contacts and then you can mount a switch to those wires.
forget soldering to the ribbon and using single core cat5e :\

simplez

Cool thanks for the info, although i can't remember seeing the two contacts on there, the ribbon just slots in to a white plastic slot, inside there are 5 pin outputs.

I will have to check to see if I can see two pin outputs