max distance from button to core?

[Turnthetables]

hello,

I hope I put this question in the right forum. I'm working on my midibox project and I'm thinking of mounting my buttons in my turntables and routing the wires to my midibox that will sit behind my mixer. I'm not really familiar with electronics building and I was wondering if the wires that connect the buttons to the midi box have a "max length"? I'm figuring that in my scenario they would be about 22" inches....

Edited December 31, 2009 by Turnthetables

[philetaylor]

As long as you are only talking about (digital) buttons then 22" should be fine as the PIC only has to tell whether the input is 5V (off) or 0V (on) so cable length (within reason) isn't a problem.

Where you would see problems is with analogue inputs (AIN) for faders and pots etc as even 7 bit values rely on a voltage difference of 0.04V per value (even less on MIOS32 as it works at 3.3v) and there is much more chance of noise getting in and causing "jitter" when using longer cables (although this can be mitigated by using screened cables.

Cheers

Phil

Edited December 31, 2009 by philetaylor

[Turnthetables]

Yup, I'm talking about 4 digital buttons. how about led's? No prob again as they are on/off (digital) correct?

[philetaylor]

Yes pretty much, again the length of the cable really doesn't matter with LEDs either. The worst thing that can happen is that the LED is slightly dimmer if you use a 'really' long cable!

Cheers

Phil