Discussions

One option would be to make up some custom wiring harness, but the downside there is for lab work, I may be shuffling components around and a custom wiring harness is not exactly plug and play (it's more like rip and shred and re-solder and re-heat-shrink anytime I would want to make a change.)

The other option that came to mind would be to build some sort of plugable power distribution bus.  I could take a row of 0.1" header pins and tie them together for ground and glue them together with a second row of 0.1" header pins tied together for +5v.  Then I could plug an RC receiver battery pack into one slot and power any mix of my other devices off any of the other open slots.

The downside to a home brew passive power distribution bus though is that all these pins are sticking out and I surely will short something out before all is said and done.

This got me poking around my shop and I have an old 72mhz receiver that is almost exactly what I want.  It accepts futaba style servo connectors and has 8 pluggable slots.  All the pins are hidden in a plastic case and each slot is separated from it's neighbors.  All the ground and power lines are tied together, just like I want.  It's perfect except for there is this pesky 72mhz receiver hanging off the back side of my nifty power distribution bus.

I could probably hack something here ... find a spare +5v pin somewhere, find a spare ground pin somewhere, daisy chain some things together, add some sort of partial wiring harness for some of the devices and get something that worked on my desk, but it would be a tangled mess and isn't something I'd probably want to fly in an airplane.

Are there any products or tricks other people use for this sort of purpose?

Thanks,

Curt.