Might be a dumb question, but looking to clear this up so I can continue rebuilding a couple of my boxes.
Do you need to run a ground wire for each port on your controller when power injecting from an independent power supply?
Currently, I have 7 ports running my megatree and I am taking data and GND from each of these 7 ports and then picking up GND and + from the independent power supplies and feeding to the relevent sections of the tree - it works flawlessly in this configuration (so why change it
) - there is a poorly prepared illustration of this below just to put it into a visual.
What I am proposing / considering is to continue to run my 7 data from the controller and reducing the GND runs - is this a no no?
Reason for this is I want to put a connector at each end (currently, I've been hard wiring it so just makes setup and pull down a little more time consuming).
If I use a standard (Christmas lights) 3 pin connector, I would need 5 of these and only use 3 pins on 4 of them and 2 pins on the 5th one. Obviously using a different connector would be more suitable such as a 2 pin x 7 or if I could consolidate my GNDs I could potentially use a configuration of 3 pin x 3 (9 pins giving me 7 for data and 2 for GND)
Hopefully I've explained this well enough and happy to hear any suggestions on best way to handle this.
So yeah, go to town and put me in my place please
Do you need to run a ground wire for each port on your controller when power injecting from an independent power supply?
Currently, I have 7 ports running my megatree and I am taking data and GND from each of these 7 ports and then picking up GND and + from the independent power supplies and feeding to the relevent sections of the tree - it works flawlessly in this configuration (so why change it

What I am proposing / considering is to continue to run my 7 data from the controller and reducing the GND runs - is this a no no?
Reason for this is I want to put a connector at each end (currently, I've been hard wiring it so just makes setup and pull down a little more time consuming).
If I use a standard (Christmas lights) 3 pin connector, I would need 5 of these and only use 3 pins on 4 of them and 2 pins on the 5th one. Obviously using a different connector would be more suitable such as a 2 pin x 7 or if I could consolidate my GNDs I could potentially use a configuration of 3 pin x 3 (9 pins giving me 7 for data and 2 for GND)
Hopefully I've explained this well enough and happy to hear any suggestions on best way to handle this.
So yeah, go to town and put me in my place please