I ordered a DVI cable from Amazon in order to get the connector. I cut one of the ends off and tore it apart. The plastic used on these is pretty soft, so an x-acto knife was more then capable of doing the honors.
Once I got the plastic off, the only thing holding the connector itself to the metal shielding was the crimped end where the wire comes out. At this point, the connector and accompanying wires can be pushed out the front with anything small enough to fit through the hole.
In order to make things (hopefully) a little easier on myself, I decided to leave the 1.5 inches of wire attached to the plug instead of soldering the cables from the monitor directly to it. So, I wen't ahead and cut off the pink shielding, separated and stripped the wires.
I found some interesting things when examining the cable ends. There are three pins (3, 11 & 19) that have
two wires coming off of them. According to a DVI pinout (below) these are TMDS Data shielding wires. These are going to be extra important to pay attention to.
 |
| DVI Cable Pinout |
 |
| Same pinout as above but indicating the groups that share wires. |
Why these shared wires don't have any insulation on them (neither in the iMac's cables nor this DVI cable), I have no idea. Making sure they aren't touching anything they're not supposed to be is also going to be tricky.
One final note: Incase I run into more video flicker issues (which apparently
aren't crosstalk from the high voltage lines, but instead issues with the super thin wires in the iMac's black video cable (thanks
JBerg)) I have the other end of the DVI cable with about three feet of cable which I can use to replace the cables in the neck entirely and solder directly to the connector behind the display of the iMac.
Hey Dave, I think you are reversed. There is no DVI interface that I know that does not use pin 24 (the RxC-). DVI pin numbers are numbered from 1 to 24 going from left to right based on the FEMALE connector. The pinout that I have on my site and that you are displaying above is for a FEMALE connector. Such as one you could salvage from an old graphics card. By using a DVI cable, you are using a MALE connector. The DVI pin numbers should thus be the mirror image. I hope this helps.
ReplyDelete