Customizing Power Function cable

Power source is an important part because we’re going to have many boards/parts that need power and we no longer have the NXT Brick as a source..

To stay in the “Lego realm” a good solution is to use the Power Function battery boxes.

There are different battery boxes available in Power Function :

image image

The basic one, using 6 AA batteries.

The new AAA battery box, using 6 AAA batteries.
Which is a variant of the rechargeable one.
(as you can guess, this version is much smaller and easy to fit than the first one)

The Power Function cable

So we need to customize a cable like this one:

image

When plug in the battery box, here what voltage we have:

PF Cable Info

 

Switch is on Left

Switch is on Right

Green Ground Ground
Yellow Ground V+
Orange V+ Ground
Blue V+ V+

So we can see that the :

  • Green and Blue cables will always be on Ground and V+ regardless of the switch position.
  • Yellow and Orange will be inverted depending of the position of the switch.

Making the cable

So, when you have one Power Function cable, you can make two power cables like this one:

image

The inner wires will be used to plug directly on a motor and the outer ones to plug on a board, like this:

batterybox cable board