QSI programming fixtures

Programming hardware setup

Below is a simple setup with a motor and speaker and the socket. I'm holding a connector that lets me use the speaker plug on the Revolution (by the "I" in QSI on the programmer dongle) or change to a couple of wires that let me screw in to the Titan terminals. Al this is on a small board, the speaker is in the top of a spray paint can.

Note that the "socket" really only connects a few things, for downloading firmware/sound files, this is ok, and the Revolution and Titan use just the pins on J1 (left hand black sip socket)

The socket adapter was made by Aristo, and also several other aftermarket manufacturers. In addition the J1 connector has the 2 headlights. 

This is a good setup just to be compact, and carry to a site, and not do anything sophisticated.

Below is a more sophisticated setup, and was designed to accommodate the Titan.  It had the same basic socket, but DIP headers to screw into Titans, plus J2 and J3, plus one for J1 in case the Titan had their pins cut off. Notice also there are both speaker1 and speaker2 to confirm programming between them.

At the front you can see the jack for power and the usb socket.

This setup was ok for basic programming and checking out "stereo", and some testing but had many issues.

Also, the orientation of the socket was rotated 180 degrees from what is shown in most documentation.

Inside, the programmer has been removed from it's housing to make a cleaner and more secure installation, but you could leave it in the housing and just cut a bigger hole in the cigar box.

The above unit was given to me by Josh Shedaker, and I used it for years for programming, but never verified the wiring to the ports until recently.

I found that a lot of things were not wired up missing connections and miswired connections.

In 2024 I started on a big project that would use all the ports and features of the Titan, and wires had been breaking off the headers to be screwed into the Titan, and there were ones not documented.

So I did a redesign and a rewire. My primary focus was ease of use of the Titan, and to have every output port monitored and more rugged connections to the decoder.

My first thought was to make an adapter to the existing socket, and provide the sockets for the Titan. This was based on the original sockets had been modified to have all pins connected (the stock Aristo adapter had no connections on J2) See the picture below:

But re-using the adapter had it's own issues: Below you can see the adapter wiring and see no wires on J2 (the bottom connector)

So, below is the idea: You can see that I was still trying to re-use the original headers into the screw terminals and additional wiring added to J2 on the bottom adapter.

Well, the short story is that this was a waste of time. So many wires not connected, miswired, and the pain of the adapter in the socket and the existing fragile dip pin headers for the screw terminals was a mess.

So I started all over, and made a proper socket with J1 and J2, AND added 3 sturdy dip headers to address the screw terminals. During this build I found that some of the connections on the Titan do NOT go to the pin that they should, and are ONLY available through the screw terminals.

 The blue perf board has traces on the other side that allowed multiple connections easily, i.e. you need up to 3 connections for any "pin" on the Titan:

• The connection to the socket
• The connection dip header for the screw terminal
• The connection to the actual output device, LED, motor, speaker, etc.

Here's a Titan in place:

Now finally, I had a solid platform, and rewired all the Titan Output Ports to the appropriate LED, 12 ports to 12 LEDS. In addition I hooked up the wires to the pushbuttons.

 But, don't open the box!!!! (yes I eventually will remove the tape and solder and heat shrink the wires ;-)