Re: bolix ADB box

>>>>> "fr" == Francois-Rene Rideau <[email protected]> writes:

    fr> I intended to plug both keyboards at the same time, but I read
    fr> in the manual that this could cause the Mac's ADB controller
    fr> to fry,

yeah, maybe.  But I've plugged like four keyboards into someone else's
Mac SE at once before, and it worked fine.

    fr> and my friend water fried his 950's motherboard's ADB during
    fr> an incident that looks quite like it.

    fr> My kludge is to keep a Mac keyboard handy, and swap the two
    fr> keyboards just for the duration needed to power up the Mac.

Your friend with the 950 might have tried to move ADB stuff around
without turning off the machine first.  This can blow the fuse on the
+5V pin if you are unlucky with the plugging and unplugging---I've had
it happen to me, once on a PeeCee and once on my own Mac SE.  

In both cases I was lucky enough to replace the fuse because it wasn't
surface-mount.  Maybe you can do that if you screw up.  Also my
Mac-repair friend Josh Warner said that on many Macs with broken ports
it is only the ``filter'' block near the ADB or Serial port which goes
bad, and this ``filter'' is a non-Apple non-SMT mass-market part that
you can order from Digikey or Avnet or something.

I think some new devices like Seagate's SCSI disks use unblowable
short-friendly mini-power-supplies instead of fuses, but a Mac IIfx is
probably an old device.

Anyway, the point is, what you're doing might actually be more
dangerous than plugging in two keyboards at once.  However, if you
plug in two keyboards and break your machine, please don't blame me.

Intuitively, it seems like unplugging would be safer than plugging in
terms of shorting pins, so if you decide to persist in your current
shennanigans it might be good to consciously stick to the pattern:

 OFF: plug in extra keyboard.
 ON:  unplug extra keyboard.

then the Explorer solved all this hot-plugging and
lightning-strike-port-frying problem decisively.  :)

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