The ethoscope would automatically power up when inserted in the dock and we would avoid cables running in the incubators, which is a huge advantage. The other advantage is that we could power the entire dock with a single 5V power supply, saving money and having more consistent power conditions. Any 5V pin on the GPIO is connected to the VIN, according to this article, meaning that we could have the two plugs on the bottom of the lightbox being connected to PINS 4 and 6 and thus powering at the same time the IR light and the PI (I confirm this is working great, on January 19th powering the PI with a PSU through pins 4 and 6)
This is the option I am currently testing: four-pins magnetic pogo connectors with 2.54mm pitch rated at 2A from aliexpress. I printed openings with a range of sizes and ended up setting on this one that seems to be working well on the Ender3.
The measures are 4.3mm width, 17.9 mm length_1, 23.6mm length_2, 2.0+2.0 thickness
The idea is to position the pogo connector just by the IDC connector and wire them together either using small bits of wire or a 17mm x 17mm PCB like the one below:
Possible choices of power supplies are:
Or desktop types:
PI 3B+s are expected to draw up to 2A each but at tracking regime they would draw more something like 600-700mA and 200mA as idling. An 8A powersupply can comfortably power 8-10 ethoscope while tracking.
