Plugging 15 pin VGA cable backwards

[Shaggy Hiker]

During a meeting earlier this week, an extension cable came unplugged and got plugged back in. The cable was used to hook a laptop on a lectern into an InFocus machine. The two cables came from different manufacturers, and the shells were different, which allowed the cables to be plugged in backwards, despite both shells being trapezoidal in shape. This mistake resulted in one of the male pins being impacted back into the housing. When I discovered the problem, I was able to use some pliers to pull the pin back out, and tested the continuity of all fifteen pins in the cable. All pins were fine, and the pin that had been impacted had not been shorted to the shell. However, the projector no longer receives a signal from that line. Replacing the cable is the simplest solution (actually, the ONLY simple solution in this case), but I can't find anything wrong with the cable, so it seems unlikely to do anything. However, it also doesn't look like any of the other pins would have caused a problem in this case, as none of them were carrying power, just signal, based on the pinout configurations I have found online.

Can anybody suggest where to look next, and why? There doesn't seem to have been enough current available to have caused any components to short out if pins had been connected incorrectly, but the result is that the system doesn't work anymore.

[Lord Orwell]

it is possible that the pin is not perfectly aligned and is no longer connecting with its counterpart in the socket.

[Shaggy Hiker]

In this case, I don't think so. In general, I would agree, but I fixed this one, so I examined it minutely, and did a bit of testing on it. It is as straight and aligned as any of the other pins in the connector. I tested to see whether it could be sliding back into the housing rather than entering the socket, then bouncing back out, but that wasn't the case, as the pin doesn't spring back out under any circumstance that I could see.

At this point, I resolved the problem pretty well: I gave it to somebody else to deal with. After all, it isn't my job, it isn't my area of expertise, and I don't have a budget anymore, so I can't even go get a new cable to test it out. I'm still curious as to what might have happened, but I don't know whether I will even hear what fixed it.