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The above diagram shows how to make the icicle adapter cable, you can change the colours if your cable has different colours. Also the cable doesn't need to be 8 core like mine (actually it was 10, but I cut 2 off), green and white are serial data back to the computer for possible future expansion and yellow and brown are power for future expansion, these four arn't needed at the moment (but might be in future, green and white more important than yellow and brown). After all that, the only cores being used at present are red (positive power), black (ground), orange (serial data) and blue (serial ground). If the cable is going to be quite long, it would be best to use twisted pair cable and make sure that serial data (orange) and serial ground(blue) are a pair (reduces interference), and the same for serial return (green) and its respective ground (white).
This is a photo of the finished cable, the power input wires are terminated in a cable mounted 2.1mm DC power socket
This diagram shows how to connect the Icicle boards to the serial line, at the head of the line is the icicle adpater cable (detailed above), this plugs into the computer's serial port as well as a low voltage DC power source, the other end is connected to an RJ45 coupler, and then to a straight wired network patch cable (the cabling has been designed so that both serial data lines are paired with their respective grounds, as long as standard straight wired patch cables are used, 568A, and 568B are both acceptable as long as each end is the same). This patch cable then plugs into port A (the leftmost RJ45 socket when the board is oreintated with the componet side towards you, and RJ45 sockets in the bottom left hand corner - see diagram) on the first board in the chain. A patch cable then runs from port B on this board to port B on another board (IMPORTANT: A patch cable must not connect a Port A to a Port B, it may only connect a port A to another Port A, or a Port B to another port B - see diagram, damage should not result from getting this wrong, but it will stop things working. There will become a point when the serial signal gets so weak it has to be re transmitted halfway long the serial line, but I do not know where this is yet, nor have I produced a device to do this yet - this will have to wait until I have done more testing. No terminator is needed on the end of the line, but do not leave a stray patch cable connected to the last board (this increases the risk of inteferance)
The above diagram shows how the cables to whatever the icicle boards are controlling should be connected, it should be noted that the Icicle boards need only one side of the AC line (Icicle boards only work on AC, not DC), the terminal for the other is just included for convenience, if you look at the back of the board you can see it doesn't go anywhere (the white wires are conneted to this in the diagram). each channel has got a block of three connections; one supply, one load, and one for the other side of the ac line. The load connection is always the one in the middle of the three the position of the other two depend on which side of the board you are working with (see diagram).
Load - The centre connection
Other side of AC line - The one that doesn't go anywhere on the track side of the board
Supply - The only one left
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