Hello, I'm currently starting a college project in electronic design and am looking for some guidance on how to achieve my product.

I'm looking to create a device which can tell me the pin out of my wiring.

For example I have a 20 way cable with a male connector on one end and a female connector on the other end.. I want to be able to determine the pin out of my cable by plugging both ends into my product.

I plan to use an arduino mega microcontroller which has 54 digital I/O pins, 15 can be used as PWM outputs, it also has 16 analogue outputs.

This is my first time using an arduino so I'm not very clued up on how I can achieve this product but any guidance or tips on how I can achieve this would be greatly appreciated.

Many thanks.

 

I think you will have a male connector, female, connector and a micro on a pcb. Plug the cable into the connector and some how the computer tells a human the pin out. Is this right?

 

Yes I want it to plug both ends of the cable into the microcontroller and for it to display the pinout of the cable...
For example something like this:

Male/Female
Pin 1. / Pin 5
Pin 2. / Pin 6
Pin 3. / Pin 7
Pin 4. / Pin 8
Pin 5. / Pin 1
Pin 6. / Pin 2
Pin 7. / Pin 3
Pin 8. / Pin 4
And so on....

 

Looks like a sorting problem. Homework?

 

Looks like a sorting problem. Homework?

Thanks for your highly valued input, using this information I'm sure I will now be able to complete my project

 

Given how much I/O you have, this should be pretty straight-forward. Break it down into smaller problems.

If you had a power supply that you could connect to just one pin (at a time) on one end of the cable and a voltmeter that you could connect to just one pin (at a time) on the other end of the cable, could you come up with a set of steps that would let you know which pin(s) on the second side is(are) connected to a particular pin on the first side?

 

perhaps the word Diode can be substituted somehow - just a specualtion . . . or a digital (number binary) in / a digital number out